Like Life

Acclaim for Lorrie Moore and Like Life

“Astonishingly good.… Moore’s lively narrative voice makes the bleakest moments vibrant.… A talent with endless possibilities.”

— The Seattle Times

“Displays an impressive range of voice and tone and a punning, exuberant humor.”

— The Washington Post Book World

“Moore’s comic sensibility is [close] to Dorothy Parker.… Like Parker, she shows the wounds that wisecracks are meant to cauterize, and the desperate loneliness that gives rise to humor.… Her 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

“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.”

— The New York Times

“Ruefully funny, sweetly cynical.… Thick with insight and laugh-first, think-later humor.”

— People

“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 Globe

“Taut, subversive tales … fueled by a sensibility as dark as Margaret Atwood’s.”

— The Christian Science Monitor

“Ms. Moore’s women have the gift of wit.… The stories balance brilliantly between laughter and sadness.”

— The Wall Street Journal

“The best American writer of her generation.”

— The Sunday Times (London)

“A stunning collection of stories about looking for love in all the wrong decades.… Again and again, small passages pop up in Moore’s prose that take your breath away.… These are stories you will want to share with everyone you love. And they are stories you will keep, in a separate, private place, all for yourself.”

— The Detroit News

“Very sharp humor but … incredibly accessible.”

— Nick Hornby

“[Moore] is a viciously good writer with something important to say.… A connoisseur of both silliness and pathos.”

— The Austin Chronicle