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a gate at the stairs
lorrie moore
In her best-selling
story collection,
Birds of America
(“[it] will stand by
itself as one of our
funniest, most
telling anatomies of
human love and
vulnerability”
—James McManus,
front page of The
New York Times Book
Review), Lorrie
Moore wrote about
the disconnect
between men and
women, about the
precariousness of
women on the edge,
and about loneliness
and loss.
Now, in her dazzling
new novel—her first
in more than a
decade—Moore turns
her eye on the
anxiety and
disconnection of
post-9/11 America,
on the insidiousness
of racism, the
blind-sidedness of
war, and the
recklessness thrust
on others in the
name of love.
As the United States
begins gearing up
for war in the
Middle East,
twenty-year-old
Tassie Keltjin, the
Midwestern
daughter of a
gentleman hill
farmer—his “Keltjin
potatoes” are
justifiably
famous—has come to a
university town as a
college student, her
brain on fire with
Chaucer, Sylvia
Plath, Simone de
Beauvoir.
Between semesters,
she takes a job as a
part-time nanny.
The family she works
for seems both
mysterious and
glamorous to her,
and although Tassie
had once found
children boring, she
comes to care for,
and to protect,
their newly adopted
little girl as her
own.
As the year unfolds
and she is drawn
deeper into each of
these lives, her own
life back home
becomes ever more
alien to her: her
parents are frailer;
her brother, aimless
and lost in high
school, contemplates
joining the
military. Tassie
finds herself
becoming more and
more the stranger
she felt herself to
be, and as life and
love unravel
dramatically, even
shockingly, she is
forever changed.
This long-awaited
new novel by one of
the most heralded
writers of the past
two decades
is lyrical, funny,
moving, and
devastating; Lorrie
Moore’s most
ambitious book to
date—textured,
beguiling, and wise.
Reviews:
"The admired fiction writer
Lorrie Moore has a unique gift.
She can be screamingly funny—and
in the very next paragraph, able
to convey terrible grief. . .
Her language is dazzling."
—Deirdre
Donahue, USA TODAY
"[A GATE AT THE STAIRS] is a
gift."
—Philadelphia Inquirer
". . . this is the kind of book
that sneaks up on you: Moore
charms with her humor and knack
for the small but telling
detail, slowly builds a sense of
investment in her frustratingly
passive protagonist, then
unleashes an unexpected
emotional wallop at the end."
—Patrick Condon, Associated
Press
"Moore's penetrating and
singular voice as a writer is
one I could listen to for years
and years."
—Maureen
Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Moore is such a bright, witty
writer. . . A Gate at the Stairs
is Moore's first novel in 15
years, which means a whole
generation of readers has grown
up thinking of her only as one
of the country's best
short-story writers. Get ready
to expand your sense of what
she—and a novel—can do. . .
what's so endearing is Moore's
ability to tempt us with humor
into the surreal boundaries of
human experience, those strange
decisions that make no sense out
of context, the things we can't
believe anyone would do. The
novel's climax takes us right
into the disorienting logic of
grief for a scene that's both
horrifying and tender, a
grotesque violation of taboos
that's entirely forgivable and
heartbreaking."
—Ron
Charles, The Washington Post
"A powerful, compassionate
novel, both funny and tragic,
and always beautifully told."
—Malcolm
Jones, Newsweek
"Moore may be, exactly, the most
irresistible contemporary
American writer: brainy, humane,
unpretentious and warm;
seemingly effortlessly lyrical;
Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all,
Moore is capable of enlisting
not just our sympathies but our
sorrows. . . This book plumbs
deep because it is anchored
deep. . . On finishing A Gate at
the Stairs I turned to the
reader nearest to me and made me
swear to read it immediately."
—Jonathan
Lethem, The New York Times
Book Review (cover review)
"A Gate at the Stairs has the
power to make you laugh and cry,
sometimes almost simultaneously,
and its wonderful, heartbreaking
conclusion reminds us that no
matter how we suffer, we still
can reach a peculiarly human
state of grace."
—Connie
Ogle, Miami Herald
"Her most powerful book yet. . .
An indelible portrait of a young
woman coming of age in the
Midwest in the year after 9/11.
. . The novel explores, with
enormous emotional precision,
the limitations and
insufficiencies of love, and the
loneliness that haunts even the
most doting of families. . .
Most memorably, in this haunting
novel Ms. Moore gives us stark,
melancholy glimpses into her
characters' hearts, mapping
their fears and disappointments,
their hidden yearnings and their
more evanescent efforts to hold
on to their dreams in the face
of unfurling misfortune."
—Michiko
Kakutani, The New York Times
"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."
—Jonathan
Dee, Harper's Magazine
"With dizzying wit and acute
intelligence, Lorrie Moore's
novel A Gate at the Stairs
features a Midwestern coed
turned part-time nanny drawn
into the full-time drama of a
family who all demand
babysitting."
—Vanity
Fair
"The ending of this book is a
miracle of lyric force,
beautiful and beautifully
constructed, with a comic touch
that transforms itself to a kind
of harrowing precision. With
great writers this precision is
achieved with such irregular
tools as voice and convictions
and social gestures, reacting to
circumstances and events–or
better, as Lorrie Moore shows us
in this fine book–to the
mysteries of love, agony, and
grace."
—Vince
Passaro, O, The Oprah
Magazine
"Heroine Tassie's wit and
bruisable heart makes this novel
refreshingly real."
—Good
Housekeeping
"A fiction writer with as fine a
bead on contemporary life and
relationships and absurdity as
anyone writing today. .
.startling, painful, funny,
universal true observations
about life's closely intertwined
stings and salvations. . ."
—Louisa
Kamps, Elle
"Moore cannot write a bad
sentence, cannot create poor
characters, cannot tell flat,
ho-hum stories. When she's good,
she's very, very good; when
she's bad, she's good."
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"A Gate at the Stairs is
hilarious and distressing,
entertaining and wise, and
further proof that Lorrie Moore
is one of the very best American
writers working today. I wish
she was Irish."
—Roddy
Doyle
"Contemporary fiction has
produced few noticers with a
better eye and more engaging
voice than Tassie Keltjin, the
narrator of Lorrie Moore's
deceptively powerful A Gate at
the Stairs. For much of Moore's
first novel in 15 years–her
short stories have established
her as something of a Stateside
Alice Munro–Tassie's eye and ear
are pretty much all there is to
the book. . . The enrichment of
such complications makes this
one of the year's best novels. .
."
—Don
McLeese, Kirkus Reviews
(featured review)
"[A] luminous, heart-wrenchingly
wry novel. . . Moore's graceful
prose considers serious
emotional and political issues
with low-key clarity and
poignancy. . . generous flashes
of wit endow this stellar novel
with great heart."
—Publishers
Weekly (starred)
"The unique vision and exquisite
writing cast a spell."
—Booklist
(starred)
Ab out
the Author:
LORRIE MOORE
is the author of the short story
collections Self-Help, Like Life, and
Birds of America, and the novels
Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog
Hospital. She is the editor of the
fiction anthologies I Know Some Things:
Stories about Childhood by Contemporary
Writers and Best American Short Stories
2004. Her work appears in The New
Yorker, The New York Review of Books,
The New York Times, the Paris Review,
and many other literary publications.
Her short stories have frequently been
reprinted in anthologies, including The
Best American Short Stories of the
Century edited by John Updike, the Best
American Short Stories anthologies, and
the Prize Stories: The O'Henry Awards
series. She has received fellowships
from the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the
Lannan Foundation, and the Rockefeller
Foundation. She is the recipient of
numerous awards including the Rea Award
for the Short Story and the Irish Times
International Prize for Fiction, and is
a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters.
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