Dear Mr. Capote

Literature & Fiction

Gordon Lish

British & Irish

Sceptre

In literary America, to utter the name ?Gordon Lish? in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits ?? or you prefer to stay away. It?s Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname ?Captain Fiction?) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country?s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck. As a writer himself, Lish?s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that ?Lish?is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.? This definitive collection of Lish?s short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one ?Gordon Lish.? The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.

Collected Fictions

OR Books

Goings: In Thirteen Sittings is Gordon Lish's first completely original work in sixteen years, thirteen stories that mark the ongoing vitality of one of the era's enduring scribes.
Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential editors of our era, Gordon Lish has quite simply changed the face of American literature. The stunning list of writers with whom he has worked closely includes Harold Brodkey, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and many more.
But it is in his own writing that his genius is made manifest. There, his quick wit and black humor are on full display, as well as a merciless intellect that skewers no one so thoroughly as, and more often than, a narrator most often known as "Gordon." In the stories in Goings, Lish wrestles with memory; self-knowledge (the lack and the impossibility thereof); friendship; mothers, sons and lovers. More than that, the language here is a collective paradigm of Lishian prose: a great writer's attempt to leap off the page.

Goings: In Thirteen Sittings

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Books by Gordon Lish