Birds of America: Stories
About this audiobook
The celebrated collection of twelve stories from one of the finest authors at work today
From the opening story, “Willing”—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America.
In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Lorrie Moore is the 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 honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness... qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.
