Synopses & Reviews
In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.
Review:
"[W]ondrously witty....With gallows humor and unfailing understanding, Moore evokes her characters' quiet desperation and valiant searches for significance." Publishers Weekly
Review:
"Although the stories in Like Life are as funny and archly observant as those in Ms. Moore's earlier collection, they are also softer, wiser, more minor-key....The results are richer, more ambitious stories...moving examinations of lives in transition." The New York Times
Review:
"Moore's best book....[D]isplays an impressive range of voice and tone and a punning, exuberant humor." Washington Post Book World
Review:
"While
Like Life boasts the verbal acrobatics and gallows humor of
Self-Help, it contains a moving emotionality that was previously banned....Filled with lovely, almost surreal descriptions."
The Boston GlobeReview:
"A brilliant collection....The funny and the tragic dovetail with precision and poignancy." The Philadelphia Inquirer
Review:
"Hilarious and generous and true. Moore's work continues to astound." Newsday
Review:
"Affecting and beautifully written....[Moore's] keenly detailed language and unfailing generosity of spirit are irresistible." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"Insightful and moving....A rewarding, even exhilarating book." The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"[Moore's] brilliant and ever-expanding body of work suggests there are few enduring pleasures left to us — not least of which are laughing, weeping, and marveling at the countless ways we stumble through." The Village Voice
Review:
"Lorrie Moore is a dazzler....She mixes comedy and sadness, wisecracks and poignancy." John Casey, Chicago Tribune
Review:
"Moore dances around the edges of broken relationships with a delicacy that expresses both despair, acceptance, and a fledging resilience to try again....These are stories that bear rereading." Library Journal
Review:
"Taut, subversive tales...fueled by a sensibility as dark as Margaret Atwood's." The Christian Science Monitor
Review:
"The best American writer of her generation." The Sunday Times (London)
About the Author
Lorrie More is the author of the story collections
Birds of America and
Self-Help, and the novels
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and
Anagrams. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker,
The Best American Short Stories, and
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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