Review [An] agile, funny, and sage take on literature and culture.-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"A fantastic collection...The essay on writing alone is worth the price of admission...She's got those brilliant harmonies and that swinging, incisive wit.-- "Ben Sidran, author of There Was a Fire"A marvelous collection...Throughout, her chief virtue as a critic is shown to be a sympathetic, generous eye...a boon to any lover of smart cultural criticism.-- "Publishers Weekly"Deft, graceful essays from a sharply incisive writer.-- "Kirkus Reviews"From Don DeLillo to Marilyn Monroe: Lorrie Moore's first essay collection...[is] a captivating miscellany, one that should entice even readers who usually see fit to bypass such collections.-- "New York Times"Moore's essays are brilliantly written, brimming with energy, and never for a moment dull. Brought together in a collection, they form a great doll's house of a book, offering a glimpse through tiny windows into other worlds, and as such they are undiminished by the passage of time-- "Irish Times (Dublin)"Moore's incisive, often mordant yet exhilarating pieces illuminate the trajectory of a literary artist's aesthetic evolution and enhance an understanding of her fiction.-- "Guardian (London)"Narrator Bernadette Dunne...ably brings to life Moore's astute critical commentary. She also captures the nuances of Moore's shifting tone, which is by turns reflective, inquisitive, musing, playful-and always curious. Listeners who are fans of Moore's sharp insights or interested in reflecting on our nation's history as refracted through landmark works and cultural events will enjoy sampling this collection.-- "AudioFile"This collection of sixty lucid and erudite cultural essays by the award-winning fiction writer is a treasure.-- "Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire"This rewarding collection from a wonder of American letters provides a rich reading list, while Moore, cogent, distinctive, and entertaining, reiterates what great art can do.-- "Booklist (starred review)"Whip-smart and thought-provoking.-- "Elle"Writers and readers will be impressed with Moore's astuteness and reach...An impressive review of one writer's nonfiction compendium.-- "Library Journal (starred review)" Product Description A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary-appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper'sMagazine, and elsewhere-have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.From Lorrie Moore's earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman's 2016 O. J. Simpson documentary, and in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the works of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker, et al.); on the continuing unequal state of race in America; on the shock of the shocking GOP; on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs; on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer); on the (d)evolving environment; on terrorism, the historical imagination, and the world's newest form of novelist; on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anais Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others); on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown; and much, much more. Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore (Harper's Magazine). About the Author Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaw