-
Seasonal Offer:
This title is part of our Seasonal Offers promotion.
A Gate at the Stairs
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in A Gate at the Stairs for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
One of the most acclaimed novels of the year from one of America's most brilliant writers.
Product Description
With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of their newly-adopted child and increasingly complicated household. As her past becomes increasingly alien to her - her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military - Tassie finds herself becoming a stranger to herself. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences - but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.
Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
`The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard'.
The image at the start of her first novel for years is pure Lorrie Moore. She sets the scene, the birds have been `suckered' into staying too long. As our student narrator, Tassie, tours the neighbourhood in search of babysitting work she sees the birds everywhere until after a week or so they have disappeared - and she imagines them not migrating late but in some `killing corn field' outside town. The mix of the ordinary and the macabre is very Moore.
Lorrie Moore is one of my favourite writers. She is witty, her dialogue is superb, she observes with scary clarity. She writes about small town America and her narrators tend to be a little quirky as well linguistically able. Tassie has a laughable set of classes in Troy, the Athens of the mid West; Intro to Sufism, Soundtracks to War Movies and Wine Tasting. She is selected to be the baby-sitter of a mixed race baby who hasn't even been adopted yet. Moore can examine whole aspects of this family as well as her own through this device but the relationship between Tassie and Mary Emma is credible, moving, tender and heartbreaking, not some sociological tract.
Lorrie Moore is a known master of the short story form. This is her first substantial novel (321 pages compared to the slim volume of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?) and it is flawed - it's as if by setting it post 9/11 Moore thought it would gain more gravitas. But, it's also funny, sad, enthralling and glorious.
The image at the start of her first novel for years is pure Lorrie Moore. She sets the scene, the birds have been `suckered' into staying too long. As our student narrator, Tassie, tours the neighbourhood in search of babysitting work she sees the birds everywhere until after a week or so they have disappeared - and she imagines them not migrating late but in some `killing corn field' outside town. The mix of the ordinary and the macabre is very Moore.
Lorrie Moore is one of my favourite writers. She is witty, her dialogue is superb, she observes with scary clarity. She writes about small town America and her narrators tend to be a little quirky as well linguistically able. Tassie has a laughable set of classes in Troy, the Athens of the mid West; Intro to Sufism, Soundtracks to War Movies and Wine Tasting. She is selected to be the baby-sitter of a mixed race baby who hasn't even been adopted yet. Moore can examine whole aspects of this family as well as her own through this device but the relationship between Tassie and Mary Emma is credible, moving, tender and heartbreaking, not some sociological tract.
Lorrie Moore is a known master of the short story form. This is her first substantial novel (321 pages compared to the slim volume of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?) and it is flawed - it's as if by setting it post 9/11 Moore thought it would gain more gravitas. But, it's also funny, sad, enthralling and glorious.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In the early stages of this book I was overwhelmed with the sheer verve of the writing. It is crammed with astute, darkly funny, and often poignant micro-observations, and so it is easy to see what all the hype was about. However, I came away questioning its categorization as a novel. To me, it felt like the sum of its parts never quite added up to a whole. I felt it increasingly hard to pick up and all too easy to skim through looking for signs of the few threads which held my interest. All in all, quite a disappointment, because I really *wanted* to love it.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I can't remember having loved and admired a modern novel as much as I did A Gate at the Stairs in years. It fizzes with linguistic brio and glows with observational detail. Clearly one of its main concerns is meaning (of life and of language) and in the early stages there's an almost adolescent delight in punning; later on, the mutability of language becomes a tragic cacophony of baffling acronyms. The social comedy is deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny: I found myself thinking that it was as if Jane Austen had been brought back to the American mid-West in the early part of the 21st century, with the shadow of 9/11 a rebuke to those critics who dismiss Austen for not writing about the Napoleonic wars. (Moore, it must be said, invokes Charlotte Bronte rather than Austen, however.)
This is a distinctly un-American novel, too, I think. If words and meaning have a habit of shifting, then so, too, do people and events; and if the `Great American Novel' is about fulfilling your personal destiny, about becoming whoever you wish to become, then A Gate at the Stairs suggests there are too many uncertainties for us often to know ourselves. The gate at one set of stairs is there supposedly to guard a baby who has multiple identities (birth, race, gender) at least three different names and four competing `mothers'.
The novel is not perfect: the Wednesday meetings lost their edge and became quickly repetitive (but perhaps that's the point). However, the quality of writing is extraordinary, the imagery soars and Tassie, the narrator, has a winning voice and a compelling story to tell. Absolutely brilliant.
This is a distinctly un-American novel, too, I think. If words and meaning have a habit of shifting, then so, too, do people and events; and if the `Great American Novel' is about fulfilling your personal destiny, about becoming whoever you wish to become, then A Gate at the Stairs suggests there are too many uncertainties for us often to know ourselves. The gate at one set of stairs is there supposedly to guard a baby who has multiple identities (birth, race, gender) at least three different names and four competing `mothers'.
The novel is not perfect: the Wednesday meetings lost their edge and became quickly repetitive (but perhaps that's the point). However, the quality of writing is extraordinary, the imagery soars and Tassie, the narrator, has a winning voice and a compelling story to tell. Absolutely brilliant.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Truly Awful
From the paraphrased critiques on the back cover and on the fly leaf, the reader is conned into thinking they are going to read a masterpiece. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Avid
Slight and self-indulgent
What a boring read! The setting is drab Americana of a kind too familiar to us
from other works, the characters are pressured by the author into unusual
reactions - you... Read more
from other works, the characters are pressured by the author into unusual
reactions - you... Read more
Published 6 months ago by donald darkness
excellent
One of the best books I have ever read and I read all the time. The way she writes is absolutely wonderful.
Published 8 months ago by William Shakespeare
A little less conversation...
Being an admirer of Moore's short stories, I wanted and expected to love this book. Halfway through, I was reminded of Dorothy Parker's review, ""This is not a book to be cast... Read more
Published 10 months ago by minimabel
Hard Work
Lorrie Moore the author of this book teaches english literature at an American University and this is evident in the style of this book. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Grahame
Dreadfully boring book
I also selected this book on the basis it was shortlisted for a prize. I found it so incredibly difficult to read. Read more
Published 10 months ago by T Donaghy
Guess It Depends Which Side You Like Your Pants Kicked
"A Gate at the Stairs" is the long-awaited new novel - try more than a decade-- by American author Lorrie Moore, a much-admired young American writer. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Stephanie DePue
not the best written
What annoyed me with this novel was all the like like like, something was constantly like something other than what it was. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Lady Love
Wonderful book
This is the first of Lorrie Moore's books I've read and I'll definitely be going back for more. 'A Gate at the Stairs' is beautifully written (the quote on back on the back of the... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Ms. R. J. Wilson
insufferable description in a story where little happens...
...and when it does you're left not caring as there is no empathy with the main characters.
What was it all about? What did it mean? Read more
What was it all about? What did it mean? Read more
Published 17 months ago by Ms. A. Wallace
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
