Moore’s first collection of short stories was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist when published in 1998.  It’s quite similar to her recent Bark in that the stories deal with ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and how they deal with those in relatively mundane, everyday manners.  The writing is crisp, witty, and spot on in stories dealing with a woman who accidentally kills a friends’ infant, a woman who shoots a relatively innocent intruder, an actress who leaves Hollywood and hooks up with a mechanic back in her hometown of Chicago with bad results, a trip to Ireland for a woman and her mother, a Romanian woman at a university medical center, Agnes of Iowa hosting a visiting S. African novelist, a woman mourning his cat Bert, a middling university professor dating his young student, and so forth.  Regular people struggling desperately to live a good life in this contingent, messy, upside down world.