Birds of America
Moore's most celebrated collection. "People Like That Are the Only People Here," about a mother whose baby has cancer, is one of the most emotionally devastating stories written in the last 50 years.
The knock on Birds of America is sameness: with twelve stories inside, more than one review repeats the same line, “the main characters are more or less of the same type,” the same isolated, disappointed woman navigating a marriage or family story after story. “Terrific Mother,” at roughly 40 pages, draws the sharpest backlash, one reader calling it “40 pages of mind numbing” and saying it nearly made her set the whole book down for good; another admits the collection was “so awful I thought I had to retire this book.” Even the bird imagery on the cover draws confusion, several readers unable to connect it to the stories inside. A critic's line about the houses in these stories, “Every house is a grave,” sums up the temperature: barely a relationship here ends up whole.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
