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Critical Praise

"Heroine Tassie’s wit and bruisable heart makes this novel refreshingly real."

Good Housekeeping

"A fiction writer with as fine a bead on contemporary life and relationships and absurdity as anyone writing today... startling, painful, funny, universal true observations about life’s closely intertwined stings and salvations..."

Elle Magazine

"With dizzying wit and acute intelligence, Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs features a Midwestern coed turned part-time nanny drawn into the full-time drama of a family who all demand babysitting."

Vanity Fair

"The ending of this book is a miracle of lyric force, beautiful and beautifully constructed, with a comic touch that transforms itself to a kind of harrowing precision. With great writers this precision is achieved with such irregular tools as voice and convictions and social gestures, reacting to circumstances and events–or better, as Lorrie Moore shows us in this fine book–to the mysteries of love, agony, and grace."

O, The Oprah Magazine