Lorrie Moore has long shed the image of the precocious talent who won the Seventeen story prize with her first submission as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, but there is still a sense that her best work may be yet to come. In that respect, this mini special issue represents by no means the final word on Moore, but rather an interim assessment of a career that is already substantial and that promises much more to come. Together these three essays (and introduction) offer a coherent and striking exploration of Moore's work that develops new directions for future criticism and will help cement her growing reputation as one of the most original and distinctive contemporary writers. They sometimes circle around the same stories, even the same quotations, reading them in a variety of frames and picking up (and at) the nuances of Moore's sustained wordplay and careful documenting of space, of identity, of gender. Thus these essays work together rather than separately, layering over multiple understandings of Moore's incisive American literature.

Indulgence in wordplay is a chief marker of Lorrie Moore's prose. No matter the voice or context, her protagonists find refuge in words' multiple meanings, as near-puns, near-anagrams, and other examples of wordplay are strewn throughout her tales. Her characters are often shaped by their language and their response to others' words more than by their responses to events, giving speech acts more import than actual actions. All storytelling can be viewed as a type of speech act between author and reader, but Moore's protagonists use speech acts as a respite from tension and interpersonal conflict, to the extent of using language to invent new characters, such as Georgianne and Eleanor in Anagrams. People in Moore's tales are rarely looking for the “right” – consoling, helpful – words; they instead use language as a bandage to cover the wounds of failing, or failed, relationships. Speech acts ultimately prove fruitless in holding off the inevitable, and her characters are almost always alone at the end of their stories, isolated by the repercussions of their own speech acts. Their facility with language is a consolation in, but often contributor to, their loneliness.

Lorrie Moore's work offers up a comic exploration of the pain of womanhood and feminism, and a powerful metafictional critique of prevailing narratives. She melds a postmodern experimentation with a gendered sense of identity, focussing on the fragmented self not just as a reaction against the constraints of a realist narrative, but as an opportunity to explore multiplicity and artistic agency. The principal focus of this essay is on Anagrams, a collection of linked short stories that has also been marketed as a novel. Anagrams offers a metafictional recycling of the alternative “stories” of the central character's life. This may be Moore's most overt play on masquerade and (re)invention, but, as will be explored, her oeuvre is suffused with women characters who attempt a variety of escapes from their presumed narrative closures and who also struggle with feminism and its consequent impact on their narrated lives. Moore admirably captures the angst attached to narrative disappointment; the desire for replication, reinvention and a shifting of responsibility; and the problematic landscape of feminism for her mature and maturing women characters. This essay explores Moore's fictional(ized) feminism and postfeminism and her characters' resort to masquerade as a legitimate response to contemporary angst and narrative tension.

This essay explores the ways in which the performance of Jewish identity (in the sense both of representing Jewish characters and of writing about those characters’ conscious and unconscious renditions of their Jewishness) is a particular concern (in both senses of the word) for Lorrie Moore. Tracing Moore's representations of Jewishness over the course of her career, from the early story “The Jewish Hunter” through to her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, I argue that it is characterized by (borrowing a phrase from Moore herself) “performance anxiety,” an anxiety that manifests itself in awkward comedy and that can be read both in biographical terms and as an oblique commentary on, or reworking of, the passing narrative, which I call “anti-passing.” Just as passing narratives complicate conventional ethno-racial definitions so Moore's anti-passing narratives, by representing Jews who represent themselves as other to themselves, as well as to WASP America, destabilize the category of Jewishness and, by implication, deconstruct the very notion of ethnic categorization.