Lorrie Moore, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Moore has received honors for her work, among them 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. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

A classic Lorrie Moore story from her beloved collection Like Life, "Vissi d'Arte" is funny, bright, a little sad, biting: a brokenhearted love song to art and New York City.

Harry is a playwright who lives in Times Square. His bathroom floods; his surgeon girlfriend has left for the Upper West Side; and trucks have started idling outside his window at nighttime, where the hookers had always been. He is the type of man who lives for art, and someday his majestic, monumental, unfinished play will come rushing out of his head. Here is the perfect introduction to a much imitated, but never eclipsed, true American voice. In the words of The Plain Dealer, "There's no other writer quite like Lorrie Moore."
An eBook short.