[2] He worked briefly in publishing and was living in New York City when he met his current partner, Dutch novelist Arthur Japin.

Moser’s first book, Why This World, was published in 2009, and was widely recognized as introducing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, up until that point largely unknown in the United States, to an international public.

"Despite a cult following of artists and scholars, Lispector has yet to gain her rightful place in the literary canon," wrote Fernanda Eberstadt in The New York Times Book Review.

“This is rich biographical material that gets only richer as Mr. Moser, a translator and a book critic for Harper’s Magazine, begins to unpeel the layers of her complicated life.

… [Moser] is a lucid and very learned tour guide, and his book is a fascinating and welcome introduction to a writer whose best work should be better known in this country,” wrote Dwight Garner in The New York Times.

[12] The citation called it "An authoritatively constructed work told with pathos and grace, that captures the writer’s genius and humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities and volatile enthusiasms.

succeeds as it does—magnificently, humanely—by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which his subject laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime.

He is patient with her, truthful yet tender, recognizing both what was thrilling and what was cursed about her.”[14] In the Times Literary Supplement, Elaine Showalter wrote: “Engrossing .

[17][18] In 2022, Moser published The Upside-Down World, a personal account of his moving to the Netherlands when he was young, and his encounters with the Dutch artists of the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

He is an exemplary museumgoer, the kind we should all aspire to be … Here, Moser interweaves personal memoir with observations he has gleaned from years of faithful looking at Dutch paintings."

Following his publication of Why This World, Moser was named Series Editor at New Directions Publishing for a new translation of the complete works of Clarice Lispector.

[20] For his work as biographer, editor, and translator of Lispector, Moser was awarded the Prize for Cultural Diplomacy from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations in 2016.