To Have Written a Book
Gordon Lish
What happens when the writer revisits the scene of a crime from a previous novel, a childhood murder dire with class conflict and dispassion for the disadvantaged? What happens when a boy with money runs into a boy without money runs into a boy with an impediment and all three run together into a nanny with enumerated rules for play? What happens looking back when an old man, a young wife, and a ladder-climbing forensic psychiatrist mingle in triangle? In the hands of Gordon Lish, such a book rivets as the terms tighten. It happens in a sandbox. It happens in Woodmere. Think contemporary master achieving feats with the art of story and the language traveled in our passage to ourselves.
Published April 23, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9900008-0-3
To Have Written a Book gives us a now nonagenarian Gordon Lish who is as vital, funny, daring, and profound as ever, writing rings around the younger, showing the world what is possible on the page.
— Sam Lipsyte
Lish is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.
— Kirkus
The US’s answer to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernard.
— The Guardian
Annals and Indices
Gordon Lish
Like Picasso and the Beatles, Gordon Lish sees art as always striving for re-creation—every motion a bold reach beyond what was. At the age of ninety, Lish is breaking into new territory again. Annals and Indices is a work of fiction that gives amplitude to stages and moods in prose so exhilarating and daring it belies both the age of its author and the limitations of the American novel. The big themes here are life and death, need, love and friction—and our Everyman agon:
how to create one’s being through language, the medium with which the self conceives. Redemption? Only in the form of friends and memory. The effect of Annals and Indices, in every
chapter, is energy and force. In these pages an unrestrainable voice refuses to tame the inward and outward beasts of our modern wilderness.
Published June 26, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9900008-1-0