num_pages: 407
description: A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces gathered together for the first time by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers whose articles essays and cultural commentary--appearing in The New York Review of Books The New York Times Book Review The New Yorker The Atlantic The Guardian Harper's Magazine and elsewhere--have been parsing the political artistic and media idiom for the last three decades.From Lorrie Moore's earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron to an essay on Ezra Edelman's 2016 O.J. Simpson documentary and in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the work of V. S. Pritchett Don DeLillo Philip Roth Joyce Carol Oates Alice Munro Stanley Elkin Dawn Powell Nicholson Baker et al.) . . . on the continuing unequal state of race in America . . . on the shock of the shocking GOP . . . on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs . . . on the wilds of television (The Wire Friday Night Lights Into the Abyss Girls Homeland True Detective Making a Murderer) . . . on the (d)evolving environment . . . on terrorism the historical imagination and the world's newest form of novelist . . . on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anas Nin Marilyn Monroe John Cheever Edna St. Vincent Millay Eudora Welty Bernard Malamud among others) . . . and on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown . . . and much much more. Fifty years from now it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore (Harper's Magazine).
language: English
title: See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary
publisher: Knopf