Anagrams - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Lorrie Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

Benna Carpenter is an art history professor who wears glass jewelry, sings in local nightclubs, chain-smokes, runs an aerobics class for the elderly, teaches poetry, and has an adorable and devoted six-year-old daughter. Yet Benna is disillusioned, cynical and bitter. With brilliant imagination and wit, this extraordinary novel explores Benna's world of misheard exit lines, love gained and lost truths almost told, and fragile and desperate hope.

Book Synopsis

A revelatory tale of love gained and lost--from a master of contemporary American fiction. - "An extraordinary, often hilarious novel." --The New York Times Book Review

Gerard sits, fully clothed, in his empty bathtub and pines for Benna. Neighbors in the same apartment building, they share a wall and Gerard listens for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna. And then Benna loves Gerard. She listens to him play piano, she teaches poetry and sings at nightclubs. As their relationships ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love.

Review Quotes

"An extraordinary, often hilarious novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"From the very start, Lorrie Moore's generous gifts as a writer have been clear: A wry, distinctive voice, a gift for telling detail." --The New York Times

"Anagrams has all the wit and inveigling playfulness of Self-Help, plus an organic sophistication astounding in a first novel." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A rare novel. . . . Its surface sparkles with wit and humor, but underneath there's a keen intelligence at work, a seriousness of purpose that's deeply touching. Read Anagrams. It will bowl you over." --The Plain Dealer

About the Author

LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of 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 member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.