A beautiful hardcover edition of the collected stories of one of America's most revered and admired authors.

BBC Culture’s Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Best Short Fiction 

Collected here for the first time in one volume are forty stories by Lorrie Moore—originally published in the acclaimed collections Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and Bark and including three additional stories excerpted from her novels.

Moore is one of America’s most revered writers, and this career-spanning collection showcases her exceptional talent for leavening tragedy with humor, for blending sorrow with subversive wit. Her keenly observed stories are peopled by a variety of lost souls—husbands, wives, lovers, tourists, professors, students, even a ghost—who are often grappling with pain or disappointment: a divorced man obsessed with self-help books, a washed-up Hollywood actress living in a hotel, a woman with a terminal illness.

But however lovelorn or dislocated the characters—from the wisecracking wedding guest in “Thank You for Having Me” to the self-deluded musicians in “Wings” to the complicated parent-child pairs in “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” and “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce”—their stories are always grounded in insight and compassion. Moore’s portraits of the parents of a seriously ill child in “People Like That Are the Only People Here” and of a woman haunted by guilt over the death of her friend’s baby in “Terrific Mother” achieve a notably unsentimental and yet quietly devastating power.

Whether moving or darkly funny, all of these pieces channel the messiness of the human condition through Moore’s characteristically knowing, wry voice, and together they confirm her as a master of the short story.

LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She has been the recipient of the Mary McCarthy Award from Bard College. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches at Vanderbilt University.

LAUREN GROFF is the author of The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Delicate Edible Birds, Fates and Furies, and Florida. She has won the PEN/O. Henry Award, has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists.

Introduction by Lauren Groff
Chronology
Author’s Note
 
Agnes of Iowa
Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love
Beautiful Grade
Charades
Childcare
Community Life
Dance in America
Debarking
Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers
Foes
Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens
Go Like This
How
How to Be an Other Woman
How to Become a Writer
How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)
The Jewish Hunter
Joy
The Juniper Tree
The Kid’s Guide to Divorce
Like Life
Paper Losses
Paris
People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk
Places to Look for Your Mind
Real Estate
Referential
Starving Again
Subject to Search
Terrific Mother
Thank You for Having Me
To Fill
Two Boys
Vissi d’Arte
What Is Seized
What You Want to Do Fine
Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People
Willing
Wings
You’re Ugly, Too