Lannan Readings & Conversations

Lorrie Moore

with Kate Moses
Wednesday January 19 2011
Tickets on sale Saturday December 4, 2010

book cover graphic The woman of the house opened the door. She was pale and compact, no sags or pouches, linen skin tight across the bone. The hollows of her cheeks were powdered darkly, as if with the pollen of a tiger lily. Her hair was cropped short and dyed the fashionable bright auburn of a ladybug. Her earrings were buttons of deepest orange, her leggings mahogany, her sweater rust-colored, and her lips maroonish brown. She looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment.
- From A Gate at the Stairs.

photo by Don Usner Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collection Birds of America (described as "one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" by The New York Times Book Review), Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. In her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, Moore turns her eye to the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. The New York Times calls it, "Her most powerful book yet...The novel explores, with enormous emotional precision, the limitations and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families." Moore is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Lorrie Moore Bio and Cross Links


photo by Don Usner Kate Moses is the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, published in thirteen languages. Her memoir, Cakewalk, is described as "a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness." In the book, each tale of her coming-of-age is presented with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionery obsession. As a senior editor and staff writer for Salon, Kate co-founded Salon's award-winning daily feature "Mothers Who Think" and co-edited, with Camille Peri, two popular anthologies of essays on motherhood, Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves and the national bestselling, American Book Award-winning Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood. Kate is a native of San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, journalist and Salon founding editor Gary Kamiya, and their two children.

Kate Moses Bio and Cross Links