A classic Lorrie Moore story from her beloved collection Like Life, “Vissi d’Arte” is funny, bright, a little sad, biting: a brokenhearted love song to art and New York City.
Harry is a playwright who lives in Times Square. His bathroom floods; his surgeon girlfriend has left for the Upper West Side; and trucks have started idling outside his window at nighttime, where the hookers had always been. He is the type of man who lives for art, and someday his majestic, monumental, unfinished play will come rushing out of his head. Here is the perfect introduction to a much imitated, but never eclipsed, true American voice. In the words of The Plain Dealer, “There’s no other writer quite like Lorrie Moore.”
Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the recipient of the Irish Times International Prize for Literature and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and… More about Lorrie Moore
