White Plains ─ Pieces & Witherlings

"Listen to me. I want to tell you something. I am not a writer. I am a rewriter. Or a re-writer. I used to think I was a revisor. Or a reviser. But producing this book has shown me what the score was. Or is. You see? It's sick. A sickness. Much as I try, I can't leave it, or well enough, alone. Anyway, the point I set out to make, and have thus far not gotten to, is this ? no colon, yeah? Each time I rewrite, I say what's been said a different way from how it had been said, which means that, each time I rewrite, I get, or the words get, farther and farther, or further and further, necessarily, ineluctably, from what I had, in truth, meant to say. So that's what the deal is. That's how White Plains got itself written. And now, presto, into your hands. Falser and falser as I, or as the words, damn their eyes, went along. You hunger for more disrobing? Buy the book." GORDON LISH As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of The Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past fifty years, including Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Harold Brodkey, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, Anne Carson, Amy Hempel, Jack Gilbert and Ben Marcus. More than a dozen books have appeared under Lish’s own 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. This startling new book will vindicate the countless comparisons to Stein, Joyce and Beckett Lish’s work has received during a half-century spent at the cutting edge of the Anglo-American literary world.

As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of The Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past fifty years, including Harold Brodkey, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah and Joy Williams. More than a dozen books have appeared under Lish’s own 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. For decades he taught legendary classes in fiction, both at institutions such as Yale and Columbia and in private sessions in New York and across America.