Once upon a time, as Lorrie Moore begins, 'there was a not terribly prolific American short-story writer who, caught ten years between books with things she called Life and others called Excuses, was asked to write an introduction to her own Collected Stories.' Moore has not published a book since Birds of America in 1998; among much else, Birds of America contains a biting, unresolved debate about the point of writing fiction. And now, here she is, prefacing her own stories. 'How to do this without sounding pompous or self-pitying or dying and doomed? . . . Could she imply illness and get sympathy? A mysterious malignancy on, say, the writing arm?'

LRB 5 June 2008 | PDF Download