Lorrie Moore

"A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all... With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay...

"A new collection of stories by one of America's 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...

From the national bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs—and a master of contemporary American fiction—comes “a funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories" (The New York Times Book Review). 

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled...

When he is left behind at the house of a very bad little girl, Santa's grouchiest elf must find a way to improve her behavior so that Santa will return the following Christmas and take him back to the North Pole.