Lorrie Moore is a writer’s writer. Though fellow author Jonathan Lethem attested in this week’s New York Times Book Review that he only knows one (“one”) reader who dislikes Lorrie Moore, we’ve recently discovered a good number of people — highly-educated urbanites all — who are unfamiliar with Moore’s work in its entirety. Judging from the maelstrom of press anticipation for Moore’s latest release, A Gate at the Stairs, we feel compelled to address precisely what makes Moore so worthy of the “great author” banner held aloft over Pynchon and other, customarily male, writers of her generation. Read More »

Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

There’s a new story from Lorrie Moore, master of Midwestern yarns, in this week’s New Yorker. Adapted from Moore’s forthcoming novel, A Gate at the Stairs, “Childcare” introduces us to Tassie, a farm girl who goes away to college, where she has her first brushes with both Chinese food (“These odd Chinese vegetables — fungal and gnomic in their brown sauce — had for me the power of an adventure or a rite, a statement to be savored”) and liberal education:

Twice a week, a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie. Read More »

We’ve been a little obsessed with Lauren Groff since we first read her short story “L. DeBard and Aliette,” a re-telling of the love story of Abelard and Heloise set against the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918. Her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, demonstrates her spectacular flair for using history to embroider her fiction. Templeton is a “slantwise version” of Cooperstown, borrowed from another novelist from the area, James Fenimore Cooper, and Templeton’s history is populated with characters from Fenimore Cooper’s novels. The result is a charming and sometimes heartbreaking pastiche of faux historical documents that dips just slightly into the stuff of fairy tales.

Fairy tales, and Templeton itself, appear again in her new short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds. In the opening story, a modern Templeton teenager watches her town fall apart after a scandal, and finds solace in the metaphorical morality of folk tales and myths. After that, though, we are unmoored from Templeton, and we’re following Groff through time and space: Argentina in the ’60s; Paris as the Nazis descend; an unspecified banana republic at what might be the turn of the century or might be yesterday. Groff is a skillful and inventive tour guide, and recently she gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of her work. Highlights from our conversation appear after the jump.

Read More »