A landmark collection of short stories that confirmed Lorrie Moore as one of the defining American writers of her generation.

Birds of America gathers stories of marriage, illness, longing, failed intimacy and small domestic absurdities — written with Moore’s characteristic precision and sideways humour. The tone shifts between comic and devastating, often within a single paragraph. Dialogue crackles; emotion is displaced into wit; grief is handled without sentimentality. Lorrie is the best. 

Originally published in 1998 and issued here in the 1999 Faber paperback edition, this collection includes some of Moore’s most widely anthologised and discussed stories. For readers of contemporary American short fiction, literary realism, and writers working in the lineage of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver.