Description:
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.
Brief description:
Lorrie Moore is the author of five novels and several short-story collections. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Review Quotes:
"Affecting and beautifully written...Her keenly detailed language and unfailing generosity of spirit are irresistible."
-- "San Francisco Chronicle"