Self-Help (1985), Lorrie Moore's first collection of short stories, largely consists of her master's thesis at Cornell, where she studied under the writer Allison Lurie. Many of the stories in Self-Help are written in the second person and display the wit and humor thatMoore has come to be known for.

Who Will Run theFrog Hospital? (1994) isMoore's second and most accomplished novel. In it, a disillusioned, middle-aged woman vacationing in Paris looks back to her girlhood in a smallAdirondack tourist town near the Canadian border.

Allison Lurie, who mentored Moore at Cornell, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for Foreign Affairs, a novel about two academics living and working inFrance. Fred Turner is an attractive, twenty-nine-year-old English professor and Vinnie Miner is an English professor in her 50s, divorced and not that pretty, but they share many needs and passions.

Raymond Carver, considered...