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“... Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its reality. This is not to say that the stories Wolff selected were not interesting stories. Rather, it became ...”

“... only heightens the matter. Finkel becomes his writing tutor, sending stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, and buying him a copy of the New Oxford American Dictionary (‘which cost me $45.50’), as if the gift would begin to compensate Longo for the damage the journalist was about to do with words. It looks as though Longo may have killed his wife ...”

“... with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and now, somewhere, we might add, Bishop with Moore and Lowell. It eliminates nothing that literature confronts – ‘deaths, deaths and sicknesses’, all the flowing and flown knowledge – but it represents it as an assuaging continuum of ‘things cleared up finally’, expressed in ‘A sharp, indrawn ...”

“... forbade him – we are less undefended now than in his day. Too bad. I could have told him that Lorrie Moore once lingered so long over these pages that they gave her a papercut. It’s still a good story, I ought to have said. ‘Naturals know. It’s all in how it feels,’ Updike writes in Rabbit, Run. ‘It seemed silly for the crowd to applaud or ...”

“... phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,’ she wrote; or ‘I have a vague ...”