Ms. Moore is keeping her house in Madison, where her son lives and works, and expects to return there in the summers. But after just a few weeks in university housing, where the students enjoy setting off fire alarms, she is about to close on an apartment of her own, for which she just bought a piano. “So now I own two pianos,” she said. “But they’re cheap pianos. They’re very cheap, used pianos.”

Though she was reluctant to admit it, Ms. Moore’s new book is also a departure of sorts. It includes several stories of the kind that have made her so admired: sharply observed accounts, both funny and deeply sad, of loss, divorce, disappointment. One, called “Debarking,” in characteristic Moore fashion mingles the woes of a divorced single father trying to make a life for himself with his opposition to the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I feel like I’m always writing politically, in some way,” she said, adding: “The characters in my stories are probably 95 percent invented, the circumstances are probably 65 percent invented, and the feelings are probably all factual.”

In the case of “Debarking,” she said, “the story is in the foreground, and the politics is in the background, and to me this is just how life occurs. Often, as a story writer, you’re told to leave that out — to focus only on the foreground and not bring the complications of the world into it because you’re going to diminish something. But, in fact, that’s the way life happens, and I don’t think it diminishes it to be realistic.”

But “Bark” also includes stories of a sort that don’t appear in her earlier collections: It contains a genuine ghost story, a form Ms. Moore has been recommending to her students lately, telling them, “This is going to sound strange, but what your story really needs is a ghost”; a story that very closely and unabashedly follows in the tracks of “Signs and Symbols,” Nabokov’s great story about a married couple visiting their son in a mental institution; and “Wings,” a long story that borrows and updates the plot of Henry James’s novel “The Wings of the Dove.”

“I wanted ‘Wings’ to be a novella, and it kind of fell short of a novella,” Ms. Moore said, adding with typical self-censure: “It kind of fell short in every way, actually. You know, the longer a story is, the more it’s going to fail your ambitions for it. I’m attached to that story, and I stand by that story, but as with all the longer stories — I don’t know, you want them to be so much. With the smaller ones, you have fewer ambitions for them, so they seem more successful, and you’re more content.”