Overview

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. 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.

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9780792768388

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Reviews

Moore balances pathos and humor, poetry and puns, often on the seesaw of the same sentence...A Gate at the Stairs is vintage Lorrie Moore. -- San Francisco Chronicle Spectacular...Gate is a gift. -- Philadelphia Inquirer The story's apparent modesty and ambling pace are deceptive, a cover for profound reflections on marriage and parenthood, racism and terrorism, and especially the baffling, hilarious, brutal initiation to adult life...Strange and moving. -- Washington Post Book World Incisively funny...Witty and endearing...There are some books that you don't so much want to review as to hand out copies to all your reading friends. This is one of those. -- Christian Science Monitor Tassie's wit and bruisable heart makes this novel refreshingly real. -- Good Housekeeping Tassie is achingly real and, thanks to Moore's nimble prose, an unbeatable guide through the thicket of early adulthood. -- People

Author Information

Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Mia Barron has worked at theaters in New York and around the country. Her film and television credits include The Guiding Light and the independent feature The F Word. She has won an AudioFile Earphones Award, and in 2003 she was awarded the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award for her audiobook narration.

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