“Tyler Gore writes with the gleeful, soulful wisdom of a fallen angel, and the cultural fluency of a twenty-first-century Charles Lamb. These essays—from the sketches to “Appendix,” the substantial cornerstone piece of the collection—all sing with a characteristic, giddy equibalance of dark hilarity and rueful wisdom.”
—Anne Pierson Wiese, author of Floating City

“The irreverence and piercing social acuity that epitomize the writing of Tyler Gore are on full display in this fabulous career-spanning compendium. What particularly stuns is the ability of these agile sentences to transform a cold page into an intimate arena of intellect. I feel the author singing at my shoulder. It is a voice I would follow anywhere.”
—Ben Miller, author of River Bend Chronicle

“Tyler Gore gives voice to Generation X in this hilarious, deeply irreverent, and intensely moving collection of essays. Bring tissues, for moisture will be excreted while cackling uncontrollably to his not-so-youthful antics and iconoclastic world view, but also during those touching moments of gimlet-eyed insight on everything from the alienated desperation of the suburbs to the existential intricacies that can arise from the human appendix. With its mix of high-low culture, My Life of Crime is a triumph of entertainment as enlightenment.”
—Alice Stephens, author of Famous Adopted People

“Disturbing, addictive, full of intriguing non-sequiturs, Gore’s piercingly funny essays recall David Sedaris or David Foster Wallace, but more visceral, less genteel.”
—David Winner, author of Enemy Combatant

“Insightful, mischievous, and hilarious, with an underlying poignancy and wisdom.”
—Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens

“Nimble, poignant and full of gratifying surprises, Gore’s essays illuminate the tragicomic depths of everyday life. With a flaneur’s eye for the telling detail and a politically astute sense of societal context, Gore braces us for the mundane challenges of being without sugarcoating the heartbreak or surrendering the wild hopes.”
—George Prochnik, author of I Dream With Open Eyes

“With formal daring and a deftly-employed narrative sleight-of-hand, My Life of Crime takes us on a wild ride that veers from the marvelously surreal to the uproariously funny, from the gleefully unhinged to the soberingly poignant, often within the space of a single paragraph. This stellar collection manages to pull off that rarest of literary feats: it reframes the very ways in which we take in the world around us.”
—E.G. Scott, author of The Rule of Three

“Tyler Gore is mischievously funny, with a wicked sense of timing for the well-placed details that make entire narratives sing. In My Life of Crime, he infuses the mundane occurrences of everyday existence—jury duty, run-ins with neighbors, walks on the beach—with intrigue and profundity, and life’s profound moments with an affable relatability. Both are marks of an essayist at the top of his form.”
—Sarah Stodola, author of The Last Resort

“As Laurence Sterne said of the writings of John Locke, so of Tyler Gore’s collected essays and entertainments will you experience the history of what passes through a man’s mind. In Gore’s, we encounter the mundane alongside the sweepingly epic, the disturbed coupled with the sublime, and the vulgar leading to the divine. It’s one thing to feel and think and know such things; it is monumental to communicate them with the deep empathetic bittersweetness that Gore conjures. He is an American Rabelais.”
—Y.S. Fing, columnist, The Washington Independent Review of Books