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Published Apr 2018
432 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.
From Lorrie Moore's earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman's 2016 O.J. Simpson documentary, and in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the work of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker, et al.) ... on the continuing unequal state of race in America ... on the shock of the shocking GOP ... on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs ... on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer) ... on the (d)evolving environment ... on terrorism, the historical imagination, and the world's newest form of novelist ... on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anaïs Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others) ... and on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown ... and much, much more.
"Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore." (Harper's Magazine).
"Starred Review. Writers and readers will be impressed with Moore's astuteness and reach. The collection is an impressive review of one writer's nonfiction compendium." - Library Journal
"Acclaimed fiction writer Moore has compiled her nonfiction writings into a marvelous collection ... a boon to any lover of smart cultural criticism." - Publishers Weekly
"Deft, graceful essays from a sharply incisive writer." - Kirkus
"This collection of 60 lucid and erudite cultural essays by the award-winning fiction writer is a treasure." - Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
"A fantastic collection ... The essay on writing alone is worth the price of admission. If Lorrie Moore is not the Miles Davis of cultural criticism, she is surely the Bill Evans; she's got those brilliant harmonies and that swinging incisive wit." - Ben Sidran
This information about See What Can Be Done was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Linda Nylind
Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a board member for the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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