See What Can Be Done, Lorrie Moore
See What Can Be Done, Lorrie Moore
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See What Can Be Done
Essays, Criticism, and Commentary

Author: Lorrie Moore

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Unabridged: 16 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/03/2018

Synopsis

A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America’s most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary—appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere—have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.From Lorrie Moore’s earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman’s 2016 O. J. Simpson documentary, and in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the works of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker, et al.); on the continuing unequal state of race in America; on the shock of the shocking GOP; on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs; on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer); on the (d)evolving environment; on terrorism, the historical imagination, and the world’s newest form of novelist; on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anaïs Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others); on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown; and much, much more. “Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore” (Harper’s Magazine).

About Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story.

About Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway.

Reviews

Goodreads review by da on December 03, 2018

Beautifully written essays - many were commentaries on books, events, and people. My faves were the ones that were her most personal, such as the one on her first marriage.......more

Goodreads review by Lori on June 24, 2018

Essay/criticism collections like this -- when they're written by someone who is already a favorite writer -- serve two happy purposes: they allow you to revisit and enjoy books you've already read (or movies you've seen, etc) through new eyes, and they introduce you to new stuff (books, movies, writ......more

Goodreads review by Krista on March 20, 2018

The title of this book –See What Can Be Done– is not a boast but an instruction. I received it with almost every note I got from Robert Silvers, editor ofThe New York Review of Books. He would propose I consider writing about something – he usually just FedExed a book to my door – and then he wou......more

Goodreads review by Joanna on December 07, 2018

It’s the strangest thing: this is 400+ pages, mostly of books I haven’t read, and often am not really interested in reading. And yet, I couldn’t put this down. I think it’s partly Moore’s writing style, the looping syntax. Always elegant, even when you get a little lost in the sentences. Also, her p......more

Goodreads review by Jack on January 31, 2024

I was apprehensive to listen to Lorrie Moore’s essays, especially after her sort of self-deprecating introduction where you can sense a sort of subtle resentment she has toward the genre … but despite this, her voice as I know it from her short stories can still be clearly heard. It is something so......more

Quotes

“Narrator Bernadette Dunne…ably brings to life Moore’s astute critical commentary. She also captures the nuances of Moore’s shifting tone, which is by turns reflective, inquisitive, musing, playful—and always curious. Listeners who are fans of Moore’s sharp insights or interested in reflecting on our nation’s history as refracted through landmark works and cultural events will enjoy sampling this collection.” AudioFile

“Whip-smart and thought-provoking.” Elle

"[An] agile, funny, and sage take on literature and culture.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“From Don DeLillo to Marilyn Monroe: Lorrie Moore’s first essay collection…[is] a captivating miscellany, one that should entice even readers who usually see fit to bypass such collections.” New York Times

“Moore’s incisive, often mordant yet exhilarating pieces illuminate the trajectory of a literary artist’s aesthetic evolution and enhance an understanding of her fiction.” Guardian (London)

“Moore’s essays are brilliantly written, brimming with energy, and never for a moment dull. Brought together in a collection, they form a great doll’s house of a book, offering a glimpse through tiny windows into other worlds, and as such they are undiminished by the passage of time” Irish Times (Dublin)

“This collection of sixty lucid and erudite cultural essays…is a treasure.” BBC

“Writers and readers will be impressed with Moore’s astuteness and reach…An impressive review of one writer’s nonfiction compendium.” Library Journal (starred review)

“This rewarding collection from a wonder of American letters provides a rich reading list, while Moore, cogent, distinctive, and entertaining, reiterates what great art can do.” Booklist (starred review)

“A marvelous collection…Throughout, her chief virtue as a critic is shown to be a sympathetic, generous eye…a boon to any lover of smart cultural criticism.” Publishers Weekly

Awards

  • Audible Pick
  • New York Times Pick
  • Literary Hub Pick
  • Elle Magazine Pick
  • AudioFile Editors’ Pick
  • Oprah’s Book Club Selection
  • Newsweek Pick
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