A Gate at the Stairs - Hardcover

Moore, Lorrie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385668244 ISBN 13: 9780385668248

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2009

Synopsis

Lyrical, devastatingly funny, wise, and beguiling, A Gate at the Stairs is Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date.

The long-awaited new novel from one of the most heralded writers of the past thirty years, A Gate at the Stairs is a book of stunning power.

Set just after the events of September 2001, it is a story about Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year-old making her way in a new world and coming of age. Tassie is a “smile-less” girl from the plains of the mid-west. She has come to a university town, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir. In between semesters, she takes a part-time job as a nanny for a family that seems mysterious and glamorous to her. Though her liking for children tends to dwindle into boredom, Tassie begins to care for, and protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds, she is drawn even deeper into the world of the child and her hovering parents, and her own life back home becomes alien to her. As life reveals itself dramatically and shockingly, Tassie finds herself forever changed — less the person she once was, and more and more the stranger she feels herself to be.

Under the novel’s languid surface, Moore’s deft and lyrical writing skillfully illustrates the heart of racism, the shock of war, and the carelessness perpetrated against others in the name of love. It is the novel for our time.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009: Lorrie Moore's people are jokesters, wisenheimers. They hold the world, and the language used to describe it, a little off to the side, where they can turn it around and, if not figure it out, at least find something funny to say about it, which, often, is not quite enough. It's been 11 years since her last book, 15 since her last novel, but A Gate at the Stairs is vintage Moore: brittly witty and lurkingly dark, the portrait of a Midwest college town through the eyes of Tassie Keltjin, a student from the country whose mind has been lit up by learning but who spends nearly all this story out of class, as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a toddler. Tassie's a bit of a toddler herself (and an ideal narrator because of it), testing the world as if through her teeth, and she finds the world stranger and more deeply wounded the more she learns of it. Her investigations make A Gate at the Stairs sad, hilarious, and thrillingly necessary. --Tom Nissley

About the Author

Lorrie Moore is the bestselling author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honours from the Lannan Foundation, The Irish Times, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bond Street Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0385668244
• ISBN 13: 9780385668248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336