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...

The first and bestselling volume of its kind showcases the country's finest short fiction. This year's stories come handpicked by a beloved master of the form and are sure to feature more unforgettable characters and extraordinary writing.

"Touches and dazzles and entertains. An enchanting novel." --The New York Times

In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America we share a grown woman s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small...

Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial . Stand s] by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability. The New York Times Book Review
The celebrated collection of twelve stories from one of the finest authors at work today.
ANew York TimesBook of the Year
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Winner of theSalonBook Award
AVillage VoiceBook of the Year
A marvelous collection . Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical . Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply...

The Best American Short Stories is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls "all its wildnesses of...