What it means to be haunted by the past.
In This Spotlight:
About I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs–a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.
From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (Caryn James; The New York Times)–a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things–seen and unseen.
A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all…
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Publish Date: June 20, 2023
With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trapdoor, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
Praise and Reviews for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)–a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.
“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
“She writes like a force of nature.”–Seattle Times
“She may be the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm.”–The New York Times Book Review
“Thoughtful and witty…Moore strikes gold when her characters…express their feelings, building to a beautiful meditation on the difficulty of letting go, as well as the ways in which a person lives on through the memories of others. The author’s fans will love it, and those new to Moore will want to see what else they’ve been missing.”–Publishers Weekly
“Her unnerving, gothic, acutely funny, lyrically metaphysical, and bittersweet tale is an audacious, mind-bending plunge into the mysteries of illness, aberration, death, grief, memory, and love.”–Donna Seaman, KIRKUS, starred review
About Lorrie Moore
LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glen Falls, New York, and nicknamed “Lorrie” by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest. The story, “Raspberries,” was published in January 1977. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.
In 1980, Moore enrolled in Cornell University’s M.F.A. program, where she was taught by Alison Lurie. Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact literary agent Melanie Jackson, who agreed to take her as a client. In 1983, Jackson sold Moore’s collection Self-Help, almost entirely stories from her master’s thesis, to Knopf. (sourced from en.wikipedia.org)
Other Books by Lorrie Moore
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