LIKE LIFE by Lorrie Moore (Plume:...

LIKE LIFE by Lorrie Moore (Plume: $8.95). The quirky characters in Moore’s short stories often find themselves in highly improbable situations, but they react with an injured vulnerability that makes it all seem plausible. In “Vissi d’Arte,” a once-talented young playwright becomes so obsessed with the truck exhausts he thinks are poisoning his crumbling New York neighborhood that he blows his chance to work with a successful television producer. The socially maladroit historian in “You’re Ugly, Too” is “almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite.” Injured and cringing, these men and women limp through the pages of Moore’s fiction, witnesses to the author’s rather black sense of humor.