LORRIE MOORE IS ONE OF those writers who seems to shift whichever way you look at her. She’s the archetypal “writer’s writer”, acclaimed by her peers and a serious shoulder-to-the-wheel artist who, we sense, never forces the work, lets it come, and publishes slowly as a result. (In four decades there have been four slim novels and four even slimmer collections of stories.)
But she is also a reader’s writer, with a following well beyond cult level and an absolute commitment to giving the reader a pleasure on every page. Typically this pleasure comes in the form of wit: she is a very funny writer, but — that shift again — also one whose emotional content can be so intense as to border on sentimentality, without ever quite slipping over.
And of course as the parenthesis indicates, she has divided her publishing life equally between short and long forms, though it’s the stories for which
