Not too long ago, I raved about the podcast of Lorrie Moore’s story “Dance in America,” which was featured in April on the New Yorker website. Guess that was well timed, because The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore has recently been published. If you’re late to the Lorrie Moore party (if that’s quite the right word for her hilarious but sad style), you should check out this excellent review.

Meanwhile, Louise Erdrich, who did a stellar job reading and discussing Moore’s story in the podcast, has also come out with a new novel, The Plague of Doves, which has gotten some intriguing reviews. You can read the first chapter at The New York Times or, of course, at TNY, where it first appeared as a story with the same title. I haven’t read either version yet, but I noticed the opening lines differ slightly.

In fact, it looks like all of Erdrich’s recent TNY stories made it into her new novel. Pluto, North Dakota, where Doves is set, was also the setting for her superb story “Demolition,” which I praised at length a couple of months ago, and one of the novel’s main characters is the subject of “The Reptile Garden,” one of the better stories TNY has published this year. That the latter should turn out to be part of The Plague of Doves didn’t surprise me, since it felt more like part of a novel than a short story, but “Demolition” worked so well on its own that I’m curious how Erdrich integrated it into something longer. Now I’ve just got to read the book….