Like Life - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Lorrie Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

"Insightful and moving" ("The New York Times"), this collection of eight stories is consistently inventive and wryly comic, with characters who are unsettled and adrift.

Book Synopsis

From the national bestselling author of Birds of America comes "a brilliant collection" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) of eight exquisite stories of men and women stumbling through their daily existence.

In Like Life, Lorrie Moore's 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 Quotes

"A brilliant collection. . . . The funny and the tragic dovetail with precision and poignancy." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hilarious and generous and true. Moore's work continues to astound." --Newsday

"Insightful and moving . . . A rewarding, even exhilarating book." --The New York Times Book Review

"There's no other writer quite like Lorrie Moore. . . . Startling and wonderful." --The Plain Dealer

"Affecting and beautifully written. . . . Her keenly detailed language and unfailing generosity of spirit are irresistible." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Lorrie Moore is a dazzler." --Chicago Tribune

About the Author

LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.