No one is spared by the witty and biting Lorrie Moore in "Bark", her new collection of short stories. Not even God, "whose persistent mad humour was aimless as a gnat". Men are "walking caveat emptors". One character has such a distant relationship with her partner, but so craves human touch that she chooses a pat-down instead of the scanner at airport security. "Bark" is Ms Moore's first collection since the soaring "Birds of America", which was published in 1998 and which spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Its eight stories, four of which have already appeared in the New Yorker, share a resonant sharpness as well as gloom. They mostly focus on the imminent destruction of relationships-if they are still intact at all. In "Wings", kc, a failed rocker, befriends a widower, while her relationship with her beau a few blocks away is dissolving.
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