Gordon Lish’s Collected Fictions Coming in April

Everyone has an opinion about Gordon Lish, the masterful editor and teacher who helped shape (or some might say suffocate?) many of America’s most important writers in recent history: Barry Hannah, Amy  Hempel, Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, and many others including, most famously, Raymond Carver.

Lish was also a fierce and controversial writer in his own right. Many of his books have been out of print for awhile, but they are going to be collected in one 546 page volume by O/R books this April:

This definitive collection of Lishs 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.

Here is a trailer for the book:

(hat tip to htmlgiant)