White Plains

Local Description

Review: "These are stories for the neurotic state of our times, stories for insomnia, stories for those who wake in discontent. There will never be another like Gordon Lish." BERFROIS "Gordon Lish, famous for all the wrong reasons, has written some of the most important American fiction of the past ten or twelve years [...] hypnotic, ever circling, a desperate entity that belies the elegance of the prose that drives it." DON DELILLO "Lish is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!" KIRKUS REVIEWS "A writer of extraordinary vision, a tireless innovator." ELECTRIC LITERATURE "It's the voice, the force of the language that compels us to read Lish." BIBLIOKLEPT "The US's answer to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard." THE GUARDIAN "His enormous importance, as an editor and teacher, to the story of twentieth-century American fiction is now, finally, not in dispute. But I guess some more people will have to die before there can be a full reckoning with the power of [his] pieces." SAM LIPSYTE

Author Biography: As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of The Quarterly until 1995, Gordon Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past fifty years, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Harold Brodkey, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, Anne Carson, Amy Hempel, Denis Donoghue, Dawn Raffel, Jason Schwartz, Gary Lutz, Noy Holland, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus.More than a dozen books have appeared under Lish's name - -including the novels Dear Mr Capote (1983), Peru (1986) and Zimzum (1993). These have won Lish a passionate cult following as a writer of recursive and often very funny prose.

Description

Gordon Lish's latest work of exquisitely crafted fiction sees a narrator - variously "Gordon ," "I," "He" - approaching the precipice of old age. Against the backdrop of White Plains hospital, Lish skewers together memories of long-past infidelities and betrayals, on-going friendships, the death of his wife and the relative comfort of household chairs, to forge a series of interlinked hypnotic and consistently hilarious narratives. White Plains is Lish at his sharpest, tackling his perennial subject - the memory of memory itself - with spellbinding mastery.