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Loading... A Gate at the Stairs (original 2009; edition 2010)by Lorrie Moore
Work InformationA Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (2009)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 |   ) dele2451 | Jun 8, 2023 | ) steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 | A Gate at the Stairs played with language in ways that were refreshing. The characters were interesting. ( ) bobunwired | Nov 19, 2022 | Lorrie Moore is an American author and is a professor at the University of Wisconsin. This is the first book by this author for me. This novel is a post 9/11 novel of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest. In the book she addresses such topics as race and class. It is a nice mix of humor and seriousness. Rating 3.8 (  ) Kristelh | Sep 6, 2022 |
 As the drifts of perfectly turned moments mount up about the reader's shoulders, along with a corresponding paucity of dramatic incident, forward motion becomes increasingly difficult. Moore is a great writer, but you wish that every once in a while, she would settle for just being good.  Moore has performed a brilliant feat. She has retained the shining, fluid, and, yes, funny surface of her earlier work. But she has also given us a narrator who attempts to peer through the shimmering veil of language to the truth behind.  What Moore crafts is so like life that to condemn Tassie for the ways in which she fails and falls short as a person would demand that we examine such behavior in ourselves. Thank goodness this book is funny, otherwise, it would be nearly unbearable. Aggressively clever, meticulously crafted -- and exhausting. Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once — unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She’s a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. Belongs to Publisher SeriesAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"...As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer--his 'Keltjin potatoes' are justifiably famous--has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed..."--dust cover flap. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.35)
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