Lorrie Moore Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Children's Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Lorrie Moore is a literary fiction author from Madison, Wisconsin where she has been living for more than fourteen years. She is best known for penning fiction works full of humor and wit, wisecracks, pithy one-liners, and repartee.
Since 1984, she has been employed at the University of Wisconsin as an English professor. She was born in Glens Falls New York in 1957 and was given the name Marie Lorena Moore, even though her parents nicknamed her Lorrie.
Her father then was an executive with an insurance company while her mother was a housewife having quit her profession as a nurse in which she had worked for several years.

Moore was born the second child among four siblings and remembers that her parents were culturally altered, politically minded, and very strict Protestants.

She was a skinny and quiet child and often felt that she was so insubstantial to just about everyone. Growing up she always felt a lot of shyness and sometimes even walking in the small town she called home was a problem.

Despite being a very shy kid, Lorrie Moore was academically gifted and often skipped through the grades. She ultimately got a Regents scholarship and was invited to study English at St. Lawrence University.
While at university, she edited the literary journal and in her third year at college was the winner of a fiction contest by “Seventeen Magazine.”

This publication revealed many things about her family including the fact that her father had once desired to become a literary fiction author and had even studied with Vincent Canby and Evan S. Connell at Dartmouth.
Her mother had at some point also wanted to become a journalist. But for Lorrie, her parents’ revelations did not strengthen her resolve to become an author.

Following her graduation from college, she moved to New York where she was a paralegal for two years. In 1980, she got into the MFA program at Cornell, where she studied alongside three poets and two fiction authors.
After giving up music which she once loved so much, she found that she had so much time to devote to her writing.

Slowly, her sacrifices began to pay off as her stories began to be accepted into the likes of StoryQuarterly, John Gardner’s Mss, and Fiction International.

It was in 1983 that things began to look up for Lorrie Moore when her Self-Help collection was bought by Knopf.

This collection was full of stories from the thesis she had prepared for her master’s. She had sent the collection of manuscripts to Melanie Jackson after Alison Lurie her teacher at Cornell mentioned in passing that her agent was actively seeking clients.
The publication of the collection resulted in a lot of attention as she was compared to the likes of Woody Allen and Grace Paley.

After graduating with her master’s degree, she got a job at the University of Wisconsin where she still teaches English and creative writing. During her time in New York, she moved all over the place from Hell’s Kitchen to Little Italy.
It was from her time there and empathizing with conditions in her neighborhoods that she was inspired to pen several of her works.

Lorrie published her first novel “Anagrams” in 1986 and has since become a bestselling and award-winning author of novels, novellas, and short story collections.

Lorrie Moore’s novel “A Gate at the Stairs” is a work about the disconnection and anxiety following the September 11 attacks on the United States.

It is also a work about the blindsidedness of war, the recklessness that usually results from love, and the insidiousness of racism.

With the US preparing for war in the Middle East, Tassie Keltjin is a twenty-year-old daughter of a Midwestern farmer who is very well known for his Keltjin potatoes.

Tassie has come into town to attend college and her brain is buzzing with Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Chaucer. During her summer breaks, she usually works as a nanny part-time for a glamorous but very mysterious family.
Once upon a time, she thought children were very boring but now she loves and protected the family’s newly adopted child as her own.

Over the course of a year, she finds herself drawn deeper into the lives of her new family while her real family becomes alienated.

Her parents are increasingly frail and her brother who is lost and aimless in high school starts to think of joining the military.

It is a beautiful and touching story about growing up and learning that there are too many compromises one has to make in adult life.

Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” Is a sumptuous novel that has been called a coming to age novel combined with a story of lost opportunities and middle-aged regret.

The novel tells the story of Benoite Marie otherwise named Berie, who is traveling with her husband in Paris who is in the city for a Tay-achs disease lecture series. Berie has all manner of second thoughts and ennui about her life and marriage thus far.
She is musing about her childhood living in New York’s Horsehearts neighborhood very near Quebec. Much of the work is about the teenage friendship that Berie had with Silsby Chaussee.

As teenagers, they had spent most of their days working at a cheesy amusement park named Storyland. Most evenings they used to arm themselves with fake IDs and then hit some dingy taverns on the outer reaches of the city.
It was in those formative years that the groundwork for her adulthood was laid.

With all the beautiful poetic passages and layers of significance, it could work as an American lit curriculum read or just as easily be a great poolside read.

“Anagrams” is an interesting novel by Lorrie Moore that features only three characters.

There is Benna Carpenter a 32-year-old man that is an aerobic instructor, nightclub singer, teacher, and poet. There is Eleanor the 31-year-old woman who is real or imaginary depending on whatever version you are comfortable with.

Lastly, we have Gerard Maines a 30-year-old love interest to Benna who is a divorced or single guy. He is Benna’s immediate neighbor and only a thin wall separated their house. In fact, they could hear when the other was flushing their toilet bowls.
While it does seem perfect for a love story, this is the furthest thing from erotic as you could get. It is more of a bittersweet narrative about people falling out and in love.
It is more like getting front-row seats to a romance comedy movie in which the leads get an opportunity to get with lifelong partners.