SOURCE: Frank, Michael. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 87, no. 2 (April 1999): 157-74.

In the following excerpt, Frank examines the stories in Birds of America, commending the “complexity, substance, and gravitas” of the tales and noting Moore's affinity for writing about displaced characters in difficult situations.

When Lorrie Moore's short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here” [from her collection Birds of America] appeared in the 27 January 1997 issue of The New Yorker, there was an unusually audible murmur—of appreciation, empathy, and plain outright curiosity—among readers and admirers of both the writer and her form. Even if the magazine hadn't made the mistake of running Moore's photograph alongside her story and printing it with a misleading, fact-or-fiction-blurring subheading (“Have writers of memoirs taken over a field that once belonged to novelists? The question is at the heart of a story of a mother and child”—it was...