Download or read book Conversations with Gordon Lish written by David Winters and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as "Captain Fiction," Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1994), and The Quarterly (1987-1995) and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary "minimalism," dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described "dynamic conversationalist"-- forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history. This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his legendary writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right.
Download or read book Arcade Or How to Write written by Gordon Lish and published by Thunder's Mouth Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his forty-third attempt to write a novel, Gordon recalls his childhood and tries to create his own assassin.
Download or read book Collected Fictions written by Gordon Lish and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This definitive collection of Lish's short work includes a forword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Beginners written by Raymond Carver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “one of the great short story writers of our time—of any time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)—comes the original manuscript of the seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Raymond Carver is one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—his style is both instantly recognizable and hugely influential—and the pieces in What We Talk About…, which portray the gritty loves and lives of the American working class, are counted among the foundation stones of the contemporary short story. In this unedited text, we gain insight into the process of a great writer. These expansive stories illuminate the many dimensions of Carver’s style, and are indispensable to our understanding of his legacy. Text established by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
Download or read book The War for Gloria written by Atticus Lish and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A legendary writer entirely on his own account' Observer 'Stunningly good' Guardian Gloria Goltz's intellectual ambitions are derailed when she meets Leonard at college. Self-taught, blue-collar, possessor of an aggressive intelligence, Leonard claims to hold the key to unlocking her potential. After making her pregnant, he disappears. Her son Corey grows up without a father, looking for a male role model - and restless, dreaming of a great adventure. Instead, when Corey is fifteen, Gloria is diagnosed with motor neuron disease, and his estranged father - this man of domineering charisma and dubious moral character - returns. Determined to be his mother's hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease progresses. And as Leonard's influence over son and mother grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father's genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it. Atticus Lish won a Pen/Faulkner award for his debut Preparation for the Next Life, a novel 'described as the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade' in The New York Times. His second novel confirms Lish as a beguiling storyteller and a prose stylist of extraordinary emotional reach and beauty.
Download or read book White Plains written by Gordon Lish and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book What I Know So Far written by Gordon Lish and published by Thunder's Mouth Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of Gordon Lish's short stories,demonstrates the stinging power and urgency of his,writing and the strength and vitality of the,American short story. Eloquent, sceptical, and,humorous, Lish creates a variety of characters who,ponder the intensity and extremes of life. Of,particular interest is the ""Salinger"" story, ""For,Rupert - with No Promises"" which when first,published in ""Esquire"" was believed to be the work,of Updike or Salinger.
Download or read book Conversations with Gordon Lish written by Gordon Lish and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Known as "Captain Fiction," Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential, and controversial, figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1995) and The Quarterly (1987-1995), and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary "minimalism," dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described "dynamic conversationalist"--forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history. This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his secretive private writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right." -- provided by publisher.
Download or read book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love written by Raymond Carver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Preparation for the Next Life written by Atticus Lish and published by . This book was released on 2016-02 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant who works at a Chinese restaurant in Queens in search of a better life in the 'Land of the Brave'. Brad Skinner has recently arrived in New York following a tour in Iraq and is determined to party as hard as he can in order to start 'wanting to live again'. When their paths cross, they discover that new starts may be possible for both of them, if they can survive homelessness, lockup and Skinner's post-traumatic stress disorder, which may be more prophecy than madness.
Download or read book Death and So Forth written by Gordon Lish and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Death and So Forth, esteemed writer and editor Gordon Lish returns with a new book of scintillating short fiction. With his trademark precision, wit, and wiliness, Lish writes outside the margins and around the edges of the death, loss, and the fractiousness and fragmentation of language. Death and So Forth collects a number of Lish's acclaimed stories and introduces eight new fictions, including a tribute to Denis Johnson and so many others lost in the course of a long life. Brilliant and sharp-eyed, this is a treasure for fans of Gordon Lish, new and lifelong.
Download or read book Conversations with Ken Kesey written by Scott F. Parker and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ken Kesey (1935–2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, including Demon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked “The Sixties,” as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the introduction to “An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey,” Paul Krassner writes, “For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them.” What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy—the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.
Download or read book Airships written by Barry Hannah and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award, Airships is a “strong, original, tragic and funny” story collection of “the creative Southern tradition” (Alfred Kazin). One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new American South—a land of high school band contests where good old boys from Vicksburg are reunited in Vietnam, and petty nostalgia and the incessant pain of disappointed love prevail in spite of our worst efforts. Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as “the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor,” Barry Hannah’s immense storytelling gifts are on striking display in this essential work. “Hannah takes fiction by surprise—scenes, shocks, sounds and amazements: an explosive but meticulous originality.” —Cynthia Ozick
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel written by Amy Hempel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
Download or read book Firework written by Eugene Marten and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called "an explosive road novel" by Vanity Fair, Eugene Marten is the rightful successor to Cormac McCarthy.
Download or read book Zimzum written by Gordon Lish and published by Thunder's Mouth Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call it zimzum: how we manage the scandal of our progress from desire to the void, through contraction and distractedness. In this perilously original work, composed of six rigorously crafted parts—and informed by a desperately libidinous, grotesquely comic rage—one of the most controversial figures in contemporary American letters brilliantly captures our humanity and Zeitgeist. Central to the novel is the ravishing shriek of a man who seeks to preserve what little there is left to him. It is as if his head were in an ever-tightening vise as he frantically seeks connection with others, knowing all the while the futility of the enterprise. He yearns for some carnal knowledge. He is obsessed with the successful operation of a sexual device. His lover is insensitive, self-absorbed. What is he—a former insane asylum inmate, whose motto used to be "share and share alike," but is now "fair is fair"—supposed to do? Exuberant in the music of its ordinary utterances, anguished and poignant in its declaration of the facts of life, Zimzum is Lish's most compelling novel.
Download or read book McGlue written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition. Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection. They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.
