SOURCE: Brockway, Michelle. “The Art of Reading Lorrie Moore.” Poets and Writers 28, no. 5 (September-October 2000): 16-19.

In the following essay, Brockway praises Moore's effective use of humor, incongruity, and linguistic play in her fiction.

Before discovering Lorrie Moore, I could appreciate just about any fiction created by a sharp mind and a skilled pen. But since Self-Help (in the best sense of the term), since Anagrams and Like Life and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?—and especially since Birds of America—my readerly orientation has altered: In addition to brilliance and verbal felicity, I want comedy.

At first I felt uncomfortable with this new predilection. Was an insistence on humor, like my new Fender Stratocaster, yet another sign of maturational regression? Or, having finally succumbed to nihilism, was I only into words for the chuckles?

On the other hand, the author of my taste change could hardly be...