[3.5] I can see why Lorrie Moore is a writer's writer. Her sentences are exquisite and strung together are sometimes spectacular. But for me, the parts are greater than the whole. I admired these bleak, clever and ironic stories but they didn't enter my heart.

Adam Mars-Jones has this to say about LM:"The dominant influence on American short fiction when Moore started publishing was the stoic minimalism of Raymond Carver, the recovering binger's pledge of: 'One sentence at a time.' She escaped that influence, and was spared the struggle of throwing it off, but its underlying principle of whittling away excess is something her stories badly need. A Lorrie Moore story can sometimes be like a schoolroom full of precocious kids, every sentence raising bot...

I like this book.I have read this book many times. I do not read it that much anymore. A lot of it is annoying to me now but I read it many times before. I read some of the stories maybe 10 times. I feel like Lorrie Moore worked a lot harder and longer and with more agony in her face while editing than anyone else I have read, for short stories.

i read this book while i was backpacking through europe, the stories are very funny and also very depressing.

Like her other story collections, this one is piercing, sad, funny, and not a single page goes by without an observation or turn of phrase worth reading over again.

Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite short story writers. Her voice is singular, capable of crafting laugh-out-loud moments on one page, and eerily wistful moments on another. There are times when her zippy, free-wheeling style feels a bit too clever to allow all of her wonderfully weird and fragile and goofy characters to come fully to life, but at her best, she carves out indelibly rich portraits of lost, confused, witty souls fumbling their way through their lives.

I have to give this collection three stars because Lorrie Moore's writing is just that good; no matter what her subject matter, at the very least, I always enjoy hearing her voice and encountering her narrative structures. However, it's a somewhat mean-spirited collection. Almost all of the characters are women displaced from the East Coast to the Midwest, who seem not necessarily unable to understand midwestern culture so much as unwilling to even attempt to, and because of this I often find my...

Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I have a big collection of her short stories on order from Amazon, but I was glad to see this smaller, early collection hiding in the library (most places only carry Birds of America). Her writing is so poignant, incisive and witty, with such precise and startling figures of speech--I both love it and hate it at the same time, because I know I'll never achieve what she manages to in prose. Moore's gifts are luminous; that rare person who c...

Re-read:2 1/2 years since last time?! Scary.Think I thought I'd understand these stories better on a re-read. But while they make interesting points, they're also obliquely oblique. How annoying!First review:I knew I was going to love this one. Which I guess is why I avoided reading it for so long. I don't think I like guaranteed pleasers!What We Life When We Love About Like

Each book I've read of Lorrie Moore's slides me even closer to unconditional love. (okay, not yet reaching for hyperbole like "she can transcribe the Phone Book and I'd read it" but pretty close). From sentence construction that sets off Pavlovian salivation to her ability of taking mundane, random life moments and transforming them into something universally relevant, Ms. Moore's made my "Must Read Anything of Hers" list. Six of the 8 stories of her Like Life were a joy, though because it was s...

she is the best. these stories' voices change too, from super modern like joe meno or ben ehrenreich to old fashioned like john cheever or ozick. here's a quote "....and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn't put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney."

“Zoë came up, slow, from behind and gave him a shove.” The fourth story in Like Life, “You’re Ugly, Too,” is most likely Lorrie Moore’s most anthologized story. It would be interesting to try to estimate how many people worldwide own at least three copies of it. It has been printed, for instance, in: (1) Like Life; (2) The New Yorker magazine in 1989; (3) The New Yorker’s 2000 anthology of New York stories Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker; (4) the Best American series’ 200

Are you the kind of person who has a sarcastic sense of humor but find yourself surrounded by people who can't seem to get the joke? If so, you might really like this book.These are bleak, funny stories about lost people, written in a brisk, colloquial prose that sparkles with a wit that never masks the desperation of the characters' disorganized lives. The typical story features an East Coast intellectual woman marooned in the Midwest, using irony to defend herself in an environment impervious

I know this is supposed to be everyone's "early"-Moore favorite, but it just isn't mine. The much-anthologized "You're Ugly, Too" is fine--not brilliant, sorry, but perfectly fine--but I find many of the others to have a weird kind of rage or self-hatred or insecurity or something boiling up from within that gives them a sour tone. Moore harnesses all that said rage/self-hatred/insecurity to better effect elsewhere, I think.

A guy visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”“I want a second opinion,” says the guy…. “You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.”

I am already regretting only giving this collection four stars, and will probably change that soon. I didn't love this as much as Self-Help and Birds of America, but it's a stunning book. I think my main sticking point with it is the title story -- I couldn't really figure out why or how it was set in The Future. Then again, I have very serious ideas about setting a story in The Future -- I feel like The Future needs to be absolutely necessary to the plot. If this story were set in 1988, it woul...

An interesting, clever, witty, sometimes poignant, concise collection of eight short stories about a number of ordinary characters who struggle to find purpose and meaning in their lives. Here is a snapshot of some of the stories. A woman with two boyfriends, a playwright who has been writing a play for four years and becomes too clever for his own good, a woman in her thirties starts dating a Jewish hunter with continually surprises consequences and a fifteen year old marriage that turns unexpe...

She finally didn't care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, "Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!" There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.I'm not sure how to review this surprisingly uneven collection of tales. None of them really hauled me in, but there were lovely moments of li...

This book, Like Life, was Lorrie Moore's second short story collection. Her first collection, Self-Help , was brave, you could really get the inside of a life in that one, and the stories there were written mostly in the second person, which spawned a generation of copycats. I love Moore, but Like Life feels like a sophomore slump. All the stories, written in the third person, have a vague theme of late-80s/90s suburban loneliness (very of its time, for better and worse). Most of the stories

These stories are an ode to those of us who feel like we are bumbling through the absurdities of life. Moore crafts her phrases with precision. The descriptions often hold more weight than the content. No one else has so deftly captured the state of the modern wandering unfulfilled self.