num_pages: 192
description: A new collection of stories by one of Americas most beloved and admired short-story writers her first in fifteen years since Birds of America (Fluid cracked mordant colloquial . . . Will stand by itself as one of our funniest most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability. The New York Times Book Review cover).These eight masterly stories reveal Lorrie Moore at her most mature and in a perfect configuration of craft mind and bewitched spirit as she explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite singular wisdom.In Debarking a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq and against this ominous moment we seein all its irresistible wit and darknessthe perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake . . .In Foes a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest themselves at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown . . . In The Juniper Tree a teacher visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend is forced to sing The Star-Spangled Banner in a kind of nightmare reunion . . . And in Wings we watch the inevitable unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians neither of whom held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead-ends-ville and the workings of regret . . .Here are people beset burdened buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad having it interrupted mid-trip and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection . . . stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relationto someone . . .Gimlet-eyed social observation the public and private absurdities of American life dramatic irony and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loudthe hallmark of life in Lorrie-Moore-land.--jacket
language: English
title: Bark
publisher: Knopf