Product Description

Beginning with a story about a second-rate film actress involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea who she was as an actress or is as a human being, this is a series of portraits of the young, the hip, the lost, the unsettled and the unhinged of modern-day America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61172 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 291 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Lorrie Moore made her debut in 1985 with Self-Help, which proved that she could write about sadness, sex and the single girl with as much tenderness--and with considerably more wit--than almost any of her contemporaries. She followed this story collection with another, Like Life, as well as two fine novels, Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Yet Moore's rapid-fire alternation of mirth and deep melancholy is so perfectly suited to the short form that readers will greet Birds of America with an audible sigh of relief--and delight. In "Willing", for example, a second-rate Hollywood starlet retreats into a first-rate depression, taking shelter in a Chicago-area Days Inn. The author's eye for the small comic detail is intact: her juice-bar-loving heroine initially drowns her sorrows in "places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet". Yet Moore seldom satisfies herself with mere pop-cultural mockery. She's too interested in the small and large devastations of life, which her actress is experiencing in spades. "Walter leaned her against his parked car," Moore relates. "His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling." Elsewhere, the author serves up a similar mixture of one- liners and contemporary grief, lamenting the death of a housecat in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens" and the death of a marriage in "Which Is More Than I Can Say About That". And her hilarious account of a nuclear family undergoing a meltdown in "Charades" will make you want to avoid parlour games for the rest of your natural life. --James Marcus

Customer Reviews

Sublime Writer
Lorrie Moore is a consummate writer. For anyone who has not yet discovered her, "Birds Of America" is the ideal place to start. These short stories reach the deepest levels of the heart and the mind, laying forth a series of scorching, miniature portraits of absolute individuals, not one stereotype, full of the unexpected, painted with the deftest of brush strokes like impressionist paintings. The heart of contemporary America is laid bare through these jewelled miniatures, and the sheer, joyful richness of her language.

An astounding collection of bittersweet short stories.
Birds of America is an amazing collection of short stories. Read them alone, in the sun. These bittersweet moments in Moore's characters' lives are by far the best thing I have read this year. I don't wish to sound cliched, but they will make you smile, laugh and cry. Totally astounding.

A broad spectrum of american life
"Birds of America" contains a number of stories which seem to cover a broad spectrum of the american life. Each story is very different from the others, but still, they are all insightful in the emotions that come with many aspects of life. It makes me wonder where Moore gets her inspiration. It would be painful to undergo all these emotions in person.