Much beloved fictionist Lorrie Moore will take the stage tonight at the Seattle Public Library to read from A Gate at the Stairs , her first book in over ten years.

In his New York Times review, Jonathan Lethem called this novel about a Midwestern, nannying college student:

"...more expansive than either of her two previous novels, the slender, Nabokovian “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” and the structurally dizzy novel-as-set-of-­variations “Anagrams.” It’s also a novel that brandishes some “big” material: racism, war, etc.--albeit in Moore’s resolutely insouciant key.

He also called Moore, who is generally considered to be a pretty funny writer, "a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one."

This seems apt in light of some of the things that Moore's said recently about writing, as in this blurb from an interview with Elle magazine (via Jezebel):

The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. [...] if you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'This is just who I am, and if I'm going to do.' There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it--you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.

Lorrie Moore reads tonight at the Central Library's Microsoft Auditorium, 7:00 p.m., free .