March 15th, 2010 / 4:24 pm
Author Spotlight & Presses
Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish
Wow. Forthcoming from OR Books. [via Clusterflock]
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. Its 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.
And 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 Lishs 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.
Publication April 30, 2010 546 pages
Paperback $17 Ebook $10
Paperback and ebook $22
Tags: collected fictions, gordon lish, OR Books
Yikes. Torn about the not-available-in-stores thing, but will probably eventually order anyway.
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this solves the problem of what gordon lish book should i read next.
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Sounds good good good.
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Nice to see him all there in one place. If you read the whole thing straight through you’d probably develop some weird tic or go schizoid or something.
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This is tremendous news.
One of the collections this book contains is called SELF-IMITATIONS OF MYSELF.
And in that book there is a story called ‘Warbird’. ‘
I am a character in that story.
I edited a magazine called WORLD LETTER, and I contacted Gordon Lish to send me a story.
Well.
Hilarity ensued.
And so I found myself in the middle of a Lish fiction.
A strange place to find one’s self, even momentarily.
‘Warbird.
Of course, this book will be read by me as soon as it appears.
How could it not.
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“Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”
Is this true? I always supposed that Lish/Carver/Hempel etc. were reacting against the sort of Barthelmean late-modernist excess of formal experimentation, maximalist use of a variety of techniques, etc. I would have dated the rise of Lish in the 70s as the end of modernism. What’s the argument that Lish is in fact a modernist?
I ask this not to make a point, but merely out of wonder…
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March 16th, 2010 / 1:24 amstephen—
sounds like blurb hyperbole to me.
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March 16th, 2010 / 1:28 amstephen—
oh fuck, was just looking at “extravaganza.” never mind, not hyperbole. shit
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March 16th, 2010 / 1:48 amstephen—
very beckettian. that’s what i get for talking about stuff i know nothing about. i just assumed he’d be lame because he edited/directed raymond carver (sorry, carver fans). must. go. buy. extravaganza.
also in his interview with KCRW that i’m listening to now, gordon says that bernhard is beckett’s successor, but he is syntactically inferior, and that is “unforgivable.” hahaha, love the rare guy who calmly, firmly states his view.
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw931212gordon_lish
March 16th, 2010 / 2:39 pmI. Fontana—
“Extravaganza,” as far as I know, is his best. By some distance perhaps.
March 16th, 2010 / 2:07 amgene—
here’s the thing. most times when people say “modernist” it’s their half-assed way of saying dude had the elliptical sensibility of beckett. blah blah. i’m drunk. nobody cares. lish wasn’t as concerned with structural innovation, rather he was much more concerned with recursive, elliptically aphoristic sentences.
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How about Joyce is our Joyce, Beckett is our Beckett, and Lish is our Lish?
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March 16th, 2010 / 2:27 amstephen—
sounds a lot better. wise
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March 16th, 2010 / 9:25 amael—
How does that sell Gordo’s book?
Will buy the ebook for this as soon as it’s available. I’ve spent too much time away from Lish’s head.
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May 6th, 2010 / 5:56 pmSpirithorse—
This is the smartest thing anyone has yet said. Agreed. And Pancake is our Pancake.
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May 6th, 2010 / 6:00 pmSpirithorse—
Comparison of writers as a “new form” is a form of reduction, and the main form against which their very sentences were constructed to withstand.
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not to sound dumb, but is that really lish in the video?
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