Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

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. It’s 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.

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 Lish’s 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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

546 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2010

About the author

Gordon Jay Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Maybe I don't like poets – or people. But I just love to catch some bardness at it, and then to test myself against the thinglessness that made him cut and run. What I do is I pick it up where the old versner's nerve dumped him, right there where he just couldn't stand to see where there's never going to be anything where something never was.”
The fictitious narrator of the stories seems to be a tongue-tied dolt so the stories eventually turn ridiculous, often showing some degree of absurdity. And underneath absurdity sometimes there is some sadness.
“What the eye wants is something it can catch all at once. But evil, there you're talking about a different story altogether – because with evil, the mind's got to get into it, and the mind doesn't work that way. The eye does.
Be honest with yourself – Isn't this why Aristotle didn't give a fig about any of this, and was twice required to say as much? Not that I am asking you to see it as how I am bringing in Aristotle to back any of this up.”
But there practically is no variety so the stories seem to be too uniform and monotonous and halfway through the book this way of narration becomes rather irksome.

[Grazia Palmisano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non mi è piaciuto. Ho apprezzato più le idee, l'autoironia, che lo stile e la scrittura. Per essere uno che tagliava tanto sugli scritti altrui, mi è parso molto indulgente con i propri. Naturalmente ci sono parti interessanti, ma nel complesso noioso.

[Daniele · Rating 1 out of 5]

Il titolo del libro è fuorviante. Anche se il sottotitolo recita "Un libro di narrativa", tuttavia inganna il lettore. Il titolo originale era infatti "Collected fictions".
Questi "racconti" fanno pensare... soprattutto alla luce del titolo che la casa editrice italiana ha deciso di dare al libro: come a voler dire "È così che si scrivono i racconti".
Purtroppo qui non ci sono racconti: è una raccolta di 32 non-storie, pseudoracconti che non significano assolutamente nulla, scritti con un stile pieno di ripetizioni fino alla nausea, forse con l'intento di fare dell'umorismo. A fine lettura di ogni racconto non resta nulla, perché non c'è nessuna storia dietro ogni testo, se non frasi messe a caso una dietro l'altra, una sorta di monologhi interiori dell'autore.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5972298...

[dv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Per quanti si lamentano del titolo "ingannevole" del libro, senza averlo letto: si intitola così uno dei racconti. Dunque, oltre a essere scelta comune quella di dar nome a una raccolta rubando il titolo a un racconto, in questo caso vi è in più una strizzata d'occhio alla fama di editor dell'autore, cosa che, come dicono i più o meno giovani, "ci sta". Ciò detto, i racconti si fanno apprezzare per la libertà e il tono diretto, scanzonato con cui spesso si rivolgono al lettore, ma non hanno molti altri pregi.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a bottle of liquor. Fun to take shots from, but a lot in one go and you risk never drinking Lish again. Too much of a good [sic] thing that is best enjoyed in 10-story quaffs as a palate cleanser between novels. I wish it was divided into the original volumes the stories were collected from, but not every short story collection is as perfect as The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector.

[Teresa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Molto insipido ...

[Idlerwheel · Rating 3 out of 5]

better appreciated when read through a long stretch of time, or it becomes too repetitive and obnoxious

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is terrific. A sampling of Gordon Lish’s collected short stories. This is the audiobook, which is seriously abridged. The full set of stories is about 600 pages and is out of print. If you have it and would like to get rid of it for nothing, let me know. This audiobook only runs about an hour and a half and has 9 stories. The big book has over 100 stories. Lish is amazing. There’s a beauty to his repetition. I would love to read all his stories.