Since the publication of Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. Her ferociously funny, soulful stories tell of the gulf between men and women, the loneliness of the broken-hearted and the yearned-for, impossible intimacies we crave. Gathered here for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition is the complete stories along with three new and previously unpublished in book form: Paper Losses, The Juniper Tree, Debarking.

A beautiful hardcover edition of the collected stories of one of America's most revered and admired authors. BBC Culture’s Best Books of the Year Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Best Short Fiction Collected here for the first time in one volume are forty stories by Lorrie Moore—originally published in the acclaimed collections Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and Bark and including three additional stories excerpted from her novels. Moore is one of America’s most revered writers, and this career-spanning collection showcases her exceptional talent for leavening tragedy with humor, for blending sorrow with subversive wit. Her keenly observed stories are peopled by a variety of lost souls—husbands, wives, lovers, tourists, professors, students, even a ghost—who are often grappling with pain or disappointment: a divorced man obsessed with self-help books, a washed-up Hollywood actress living in a hotel, a woman with a terminal illness. But however lovelorn or dislocated the characters—from the wisecracking wedding guest in “Thank You for Having Me” to the self-deluded musicians in “Wings” to the complicated parent-child pairs in “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” and “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce”—their stories are always grounded in insight and compassion. Moore’s portraits of the parents of a seriously ill child in “People Like That Are the Only People Here” and of a woman haunted by guilt over the death of her friend’s baby in “Terrific Mother” achieve a notably unsentimental and yet quietly devastating power. Whether moving or darkly funny, all of these pieces channel the messiness of the human condition through Moore’s characteristically knowing, wry voice, and together they confirm her as a master of the short story.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A collection of stories by one of America’s most beloved and admired short-story writers that explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal an exquisite, singular wisdom. • “Uncanny.... Moving.... A powerful collection.” —The Washington Post Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad, having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection ... stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives, with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relation—to someone….

From the national bestselling author of Birds of America comes “a brilliant collection” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) of eight exquisite stories of men and women stumbling through their daily existence. In Like Life, Lorrie Moore’s men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

From the national bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs—and a master of contemporary American fiction—comes “a funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories" (The New York Times Book Review). In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories that’s “one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" (The New York Times Book Review). A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language. From the opening story, "Willing"—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People" ("There is nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being"), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is. In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties. In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.

A remarkable collection of essays and reviews on everything from Philip Roth to Margaret Atwood, from race in America to the shocking state of the GOP—from the national bestselling author of Birds of America and a master of contemporary American fiction. “The kind of book, and the kind of human, you’d want to guide you through the past few decades in letters and culture.... Moore is one of our best documentarians of everyday amazement.” —The New Yorker This essential, enlightening, truly delightful collection shows one of our greatest writers parsing the political, artistic, and media landscape of the past three decades. These sixty-six essays and reviews, culled from the pages of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others, find Lorrie Moore turning her discerning eye on everything from celebrity culture to the wilds of television, from Stephen Sondheim to Barack Obama. See What Can Be Done is a perfect blend of craft, brains, and a knowing, singular take on life, liberty, and the pursuit of (some kind of) happiness.