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Lorrie Moore Collection Lorrie Moore: Mo(o)re than an Interim Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2012

DAVID BRAUNER  and
HEIDI SLETTEDAHL MACPHERSON
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Abstract

Lorrie Moore has long shed the image of the precocious talent who won the Seventeen story prize with her first submission as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, but there is still a sense that her best work may be yet to come. In that respect, this mini special issue represents by no means the final word on Moore, but rather an interim assessment of a career that is already substantial and that promises much more to come. Together these three essays (and introduction) offer a coherent and striking exploration of Moore's work that develops new directions for future criticism and will help cement her growing reputation as one of the most original and distinctive contemporary writers. They sometimes circle around the same stories, even the same quotations, reading them in a variety of frames and picking up (and at) the nuances of Moore's sustained wordplay and careful documenting of space, of identity, of gender. Thus these essays work together rather than separately, layering over multiple understandings of Moore's incisive American literature.

Type
Lorrie Moore Collection
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 541 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Robert McCrum, The Observer, 10 April 2010.

2 See the dust jacket of Faber and Faber hardback edition of The Collected Stories for these and other plaudits.

3 Gaffney, Elizabeth, “Lorrie Moore: The Art of Fiction CLXVII,” Paris Review, 158 (Spring/Summer 2001), available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/the-art-of-fiction-no–167-lorrie-moore, accessed 1 March 2011.Google Scholar

4 Chodat, Robert, “Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 52, 1 (Spring 2006), 42–60, 42, 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Kelly, Alison, Understanding Lorrie Moore (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 151–52Google Scholar.

6 Although herself a professor of English literature at the University of Wisconsin, Moore's fiction contains several jibes at academic discourse, notably when Olena, the protagonist of the story “Community Life” in Birds of America, refers to literary theory as “the vocabulary of arson” (59). Elsewhere in the collection academic publishing is described as “a big Circle Jerk.”

7 Jonathan Lethem, “Eyes Wide Open,” review of A Gate at the Stairs, New York Times, 27 Aug. 2009, available at www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Lethem-t.html, accessed 2 Sept. 2011.

8 Ron Charles, untitled review of A Gate at the Stairs, Washington Post, 2 Sept. 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/01/AR2009090103858.html, accessed 2 Sept. 2011.

9 Michiko Kakutani, “First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein, and Loss,” review of A Gate at the Stairs, New York Times, 27 Aug. 2009, available at www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/books/28book.html, accessed 2 Sept. 2011.

10 Paul Harris, The Observer, 27 Sept. 2009, 37.

11 Chodat, 42.

12 “A virtuouso performance,” review of A Gate at the Stairs, The Observer “Review” section, 27 Sept. 2009, 20.

13 Dwight Garner, “Moore's Better Blues,” Salon, 27 Oct. 1998, available at www.salon.com/books/int/1998/10/cov_27int2.html, accessed 1 March 2011.

14 Gaffney.

15 “Home Truths,” review of John Updike, The Early Stories, 1953–1975, New York Review of Books, 11 Aug. 2005, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/nov/20/home-truths, accessed 1 March 2011.

16 Lorrie Moore, “A House Divided,” review of Ann Beattie, Park City: New and Selected Short Stories, New York Times, 28 June, 1998, available at www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/28/reviews/980628.28moor.html, accessed 1 March 2011.

17 Helena de Bertodano, “Lorrie Moore interview,” The Telegraph, 7 Oct. 2009, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/6256085/Lorrie-Moore-interview.html, accessed 1 March 2011.

18 Quoted in Showalter, Elaine, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (London: Virago, 2009), 547Google Scholar.

19 Quoted in Weekes, Karen, “Identity in the Short Story Cycles of Lorrie Moore,” Journal of the Short Story in English, 39 (Fall 2002), 109–22, 116Google Scholar.

20 Kelly, Understanding Lorrie Moore, 141.

21 Showalter, 476, 477, 546.

22 Caryn James, “Neither Winners Nor Wimps,” interview with Lorrie Moore, www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/moore-help.html, accessed 1 March 2011.

23 Gaffney.

24 James.

25 Janet R. Raiffa, “Lorrie Moore,” in Blanche H. Gelfant, ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 384–390, 387.

26 Gaffney.

27 Ibid.

28 Howells, Coral Ann, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (London: Methuen, 1987), 73Google Scholar; Munro, Alice, Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Plume, 1971), 249Google Scholar.

29 Raiffa, 389.

30 Jay McInerney, “New and Improved Lives,” New York Times, 24 March 1985, available at www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/moore-help.html, accessed 1 March 2011.

31 Raiffa, 384.

32 Gaffney.

33 See Hollinger, David A., Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 8Google Scholar.