Lorrie Moore’s Power

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home” marks Lorrie Moore’s return to the novel in over a decade, when “A Gate at the Stairs,” a family drama that combined post 9/11 anxiety with questions on race, religion, and identity, was a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. Moore will discuss her new novel with her Alfred A. Knopf editor, Victoria Wilson, at Morton Memorial Library in Rhinecliff, N.Y., on Saturday, June 24, presented through Oblong Books. “I Am Homeless” starts as a New York story and turns into a cross-country trek as a man carries out the final wish of his recently deceased ex-girlfriend.

Best known for her short stories, Moore’s fiction has frequently appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, including her 1998 O. Henry Award winner “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” and more recently in 2020, “Facetime” a matter of fact and shiveringly realistic depiction of a woman communicating with her dying father in the ICU over a video call. Moore’s career took off in 1986 with her short story collection “Self Help,” also edited by Wilson. Like confessions from another world, pulled from the secret lives of women in a downward spiral dance with love (or sometimes just the idea of love), the fiction in “Self Help” is stark yet lyrically honest and inventive. She writes as if she knows you.