Collected Fictions
Gordon Lish
Language: English
Pages: 546
ISBN: 0984295054
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
doubtless occur in me, be a homeward reoccurrence in me, would presently be recurring in me as I would go coursing back up the avenue for home and for the woman Susan—or would it be for Susanne? But I was tearless when taking the loaf that I wanted from the basket where all the loaves, in invitation, were presented all of the way up on end. Tearless, too, when preparing myself to turn to give money to the young thing at the cash register. Tearless, three, when I heard "Mr. Lish is
Or put for me into perspective for me the whole pointless glut of it for me? Because bet you she could have. Called her Boody. Or she me. Beats me from whence the practice cameth. Or the note about Roxie Raye—as in "Roxie Raye." Hey, what's this—"Zig-Sauer?" So what's this Zig-Sauer doing down there? This is the name of somebody or what? 2026 Bay State Road, Boston, which is the address of The Partisan Review, isn't it? Ethan—"money for
I am forty-seven years old. I still want to say it wasn't me, it wasn't me, that I am innocent, innocent—I swear, I am. I'M WIDE MY WIFE AND SMALL SON were away for the week, having removed themselves from the day-to-day predicament for a brief travel to a place of better weather. I was fine the first night, and remained equally fine the second and third, feeding myself from the cabinets and cupboards and pantry and doing what seemed expectable in the way of tidying up. Yet
TWO CHILDREN in each of these families. As regards the amplitude, or the relative fall-off therefrom, of the light in the second set of children, the evidence isn't all available for the recording of it yet. But here is some that is. It is the declaration of the spouse that worried about the light. This is what he said: "My boy came to me, the younger one. The older one already knows. I never told him, of course. But he figured it out. Now the younger one has too. I love the older
O, hoshana in the highest! HOSHANA? BALZANO & SON I EXPECT THAT IT IS NECESSARY for me to tell you the true story of my father's shoes—for I have so often told—if not you, then others—such false stories of my father's shoes, sometimes claiming for my father's shoes some sort of formal irregularity that would enforce the thought of there being a certain abnormality of the feet my father had. But there was nothing exceptional about my father's feet. My father's feet were