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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.

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Coming April 23, 2024

In To Have Written a Book, his tumultuously moving newest novel, Gordon Lish augments his legacy.
— Cynthia Ozick

Lish is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.
— Kirkus

The US’s answer to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernard.
— The Guardian
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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.

Coming June 26, 2024

“In our literary cosmos, Gordon Lish has never, in the span of two half-centuries, mirrored the occasional meteor that streaks across the firmament, leaving no material or imperial sign. Instead, as in Annals and Indices, he is a mighty meteorite which, targeting our world, begets a verdant crater to change the landscape forever. His authenticity is his authority. Before Lish, there was no Lishian idiom; yet after Lish, it remains his alone, and living, and inimitable.”
— Cynthia Ozick

Gordon Lish, famous for all the wrong reasons, has written some of the most fascinating American fiction.
— Don DeLillo

A writer of extraordinary vision, a tireless innovator.
— Electric Literature
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