by Lorrie Moore
First published 2018
Lorrie Moore brings together over fifty prose pieces spanning three decades of cultural observation. The collection opens with her early literary reviews of Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, then moves through her sharp takes on contemporary fiction writers like Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Alice Munro. Moore examines the persistent inequalities in American race relations and dissects the Republican Party's transformation. She explores celebrity culture's cruel mechanics and analyzes television from The Wire to True Detective. The essays tackle environmental decline, terrorism, and the changing role of novelists in modern society. Moore profiles literary figures including John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Bernard Malamud, examining how biography intersects with artistic creation. She writes about Helen Gurley Brown and covers cultural touchstones from Ezra Edelman's O.J. Simpson documentary to the phenomenon of Making a Murderer. These pieces reveal Moore's ability to decode political, artistic, and media language with precision and wit, offering readers a master storyteller's perspective on what defines contemporary American life.
Genres: essays, literary-fiction, american-fiction, biography-memoir, criticism, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking, witty
Tropes: cultural-commentary, literary-analysis, personal-essays
Setting: America, United States
Period: 21st Century, Contemporary
Audio CD · Blackstone Publishing