from the Introduction by Lauren Groff Literature, when I was young, was dead, white, and mostly male. It was unusual for even the nerdiest kids of my generation to know otherwise; in school, we''d been given Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Huxley, Hemingway, Thoreau, Stephen Crane, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allen Poe, et cetera, with a few dips beyond the pale into Sylvia Plath or the Brontës, who - albeit also dead and white - shocked us all by daring to be female. Those of us who received on our birthdays a dutiful fistful of gift certificates to mall bookstores used them to stock up on the foundational texts, the Whitmans, Flauberts, and Henry Jameses of the world, until we felt more or less comfortable swimming in the shallows of the canon. My second semester in college, I decided to take an introductory fiction-writing class in what I see now was a furious attempt to set off a bomb in the galleries of literature, where the white marble busts of dead male authors glared down at me from plinths in their endless rows. The day I picked up my course packet from the printers, I began to read it on my walk home, and though the afternoon was windy and cold and slippery with ice, I dawdled, slower and slower, until I had come to a full and frozen stop in the middle of the sidewalk. At last I gave up on dinner and studying, went to my room, and did not stop reading until I finished the whole packet in the middle of the night.

When I looked up, I found that the doors of my mind had been blown wide open. Suddenly, here was the work of contemporary women: brilliant, inventive, wild, diverse, astonishingly alive. Here was Grace Paley, snappish and political, Toni Cade Bambara, whose stories made me breathless, Louise Erdrich, MavisGallant, Alice Munro. Most of all, here was Lorrie Moore. It is impossible to overstate how deeply it can move you to discover, in a literary world that you love all the way to the bedrock but find mostly barren of any trace of yourself, a voice that could be your own, if only refined into art. Moore''s short stories were a series of small explosions: smart, perceptive, despairing, so modern they thrummed with the urgency of my own young person''s anxieties and obsessions, so mordantly funny that I laughed out of sheer, astonished, often gleeful pain. My gateway Lorrie Moore was "How to Become a Writer," from her first collection Self-Help , which, in an unofficial survey of most of my writer friends was their first hit of her, too. Irony is sometimes difficult for the young and naive, and in the second-person apostrophizing of the story, I found actual directives about how to be a writer that I swallowed whole and believed with my entire being.

When I read, "First, try to be something, anything, else," I thought, Yes! because I had tried pre-med for precisely one day, until I understood that being a pediatrician meant an endless parade of sick kids; when later in the story I read, "The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle ofthe night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments ofexhilaration when you know: you are a genius," I thought, Allright, if Lorrie Moore says this is what will happen, I''ll try it. So I did. Soon, those ecstatic hours in the deep of night became my most secret, most beloved, most lasting of joys. Writers are solitary beasts, but not one of us has ever entered a life of writing alone, and most of us can identify the voice that guided us through the blind and treacherous tunnels that we must enter when we go from being a reader to being a writer. Lorrie Moore was this for me. In an essay in her collection See What Can Be Done , she write that, "A book by a woman, a book that began up close, on the heart''s porch, was a treat, an exhilaration, and finally, I think, that is why women who became writers did so: to create more books in the world by women, to give themselves something more to read." In those heady early days of writing fiction, love drunk with contemporary short stories, I went one step further: I not only wanted to create more books so that I could give myself something to read; I wanted to create more books in the very particular voice of Lorrie Moore.

That this was a fool''s errand would become painfully clear in a few years; Lorrie Moore''s voice is, of course, singular and irreproducible. Those of us who worked hard to understand what a literary voice even is can observe, with awe, how the sharpness, clarity, and wit of Moore''s voice was evident from the very beginning of her writing life. She was nineteen and on a scholarship at St. Lawrence, a small liberal arts college in New York State, when she won Seventeen Magazine''s fiction contest. She''d grown up a dreamy, bookish child in Glens Falls, New York to parents who were involved in amateur theater and who, perhaps in only apparent paradox, read passages from the Bible at dinner every night. After college, she became a paralegal in New York City, wrote one of the stories that would appear in 1985 in Self-Help , and after two years of midtown Manhattan office work, went onto Cornell to earn an M.F.A.

After graduation, she stayed on a tCornell as a lecturer, then she moved to Madison, Wisconsin to begin a professorship there. A year after Self-Help , Moore published Anagrams , a novel with a brilliant and experimental structure: it''s a variation on themes, the characters restarting over and over into new, slightly different stories, which work together to prime the reader for emotional devastation in the longest, final version. The collection Like Life , which came out in 1990, contains the widely anthologized story "You''re Ugly, Too," which was also Moore''s first story of many to appear in The New Yorker . In 1994, she published Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, a slender and nearly perfect book about longing and love in a friendship between teenaged girls in a small town near the border of NewYork State and Canada. Four years later, in 1998, the story collection Birds of America was published, which finally brought Moore an international reputation for being a literary genius ofthe highest order. Birds of America contains many of my favorite Lorrie Moore stories, including the one that I have actual holy feelings about, the harrowing and famous "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk." This is a story written from the deepest part of the soul; it sings with rage and despair, cuts you with its violent maternal love,and wears its wit like the pitch-black bravado of a man facing a firing squad. Moore''s third novel, A Gate at the Stairs , a rich work about race, class, loss, and the Midwest after 9/11, was publishedin 2009; it''s a book so dark and deeply-felt and harrowing that I still carry it around inside my heart like one of my own personal ghosts.

In 2013, Moore left the University of Wisconsin to teach at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she published her most recent story collection, the bold and wide-ranging Bark . When critics speak of Lorrie Moore''s voice, they tend to focus on her humor; it is such a dazzling gift that it can blind even agood reader to the endless other modes and varieties of mastery in her work. Moore''s jokes, puns, wordplay, and gimlet eye do build to create a comedic surface tension that''s unequaled in its range and sophistication. Her characters put their humor to a wide variety of uses: to try to smooth over awkwardness, to defang their terror, to stave off despair, to endear themselves to lovers they sense are drawing away, to armor themselves against the aggressions of others, to put up a brave front when it seems that everything around them is caving in, to gesture helplessly at the absurdity of the world. In the story "Real Estate," the "Ha!" repeated beyond the point of absurdity with which the character Ruth responds to her husband''s "parade of flings" pushes into a sense of panic, and then almost hysterical pain. It replicates the way that our thoughts of betrayal can metastasize and overwhelm us and breed ever more (often imaginary) betrayals. Each time I read this story, I sit in discomfort with these pages, reading each "Ha!" as another fling that Ruth has tormented herself with, another memory of a night in which her husband had said he''d be working late, another woman friend she now holds in suspicion. While the effect of the humor is important, a deeper level of complication becomes apparent when one begins to consider the infinitely tangled emotions that give rise to the humor.

In the story "Debarking," when middle-aged divorcé Ira is weirded out by his new girlfriend Zora''s near-sexual dependency on her surly adolescent son and humiliated over and over again by the boy, he doesn''t ever respond the way he wants to but instead bites back in the comfort of his mind by thinking up new verses to add to the jokey collection he''s writing, a "little volume of doggerel, its tentative title Women from Venus, Men from - well -Penis." In this case and in so many more, the humor in Moore''s stories erupts when a clear-sighted character has a devastating observation so urgent that it rises up out of the depths, but -because they are inherently kind and don''t want to cause pain- the observation gets warped or twisted just before it reaches consciousness, so that when it is at last released, it has crumpled under its own weight and has become humor. Jokes, puns, and wit become survival techniques of people who would never be as cruel in life as their internal critics are. Lorrie Moore once wrote in an essay on the television series True Detective that "simultaneously embracing laughter and the object of that laughteris only irony and Keatsian intelligence, no.