Corner Kicker

(Paperback)

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Description

Years ago, Gordon Lish, editor at Esquire and at the house of Knopf and the revisionist who changed the work of Raymond Carver, published the book Peru, a shocker in which Lish tells of his having killed a child in a neighbor's sandbox. The setting is the NYC suburban Jewish enclave known as the Five Towns, especially the villages of Woodmere, Cedarhurst, and Lawrence. Now he's being blackmailed for the unprosecuted crime, a death by toy hoe. But Lish's wife Penelope, a forbidding figure fifty-seven years his junior with hush-hush ties to the government, steps in and makes After Peru the strangest event in a world-famous career.

Reviews

Praise for Death and So Forth "Prickly and insightful, the collection reads like a biography told in vivid snapshots. Lishs passion, incisiveness, and irascibility blaze through." -Publishers Weekly "Lish playfully makes tragic events funny or hopeful and often rendersthe profound inane. This is a story collection by a master of the craft and a fine late addendum toan incredible career." -Booklist "Now, at 87, feeling closer to his end than to his beginning and thrilled by the morbid drama of it all, Lish has written Death and So Forth, a new book of stories about Gordo that drops the curtain on his long performance. Or so the old vaudevillian would have us think. When a legendary rascal such as Lish puts death in the title of a book about a super-rascal such as Gordo, you can be sure he intends to live forever and is engaged in a Tom Sawyerlike prank, attending his own funeral in disguise. ... Look, for my money, its all show business, Gordo declares in a piece on Harold Bloom, the fabled Yale literary critic and one of the authors late, lamented pals. Hes outlived a lot of them, and hes happy to let us know itKen Kesey and Denis Johnson, to name a couplebecause thats what it means to be a man of letters of Lishs still-consciously manly generation: you toast the ones who go before in the hopes that the ones who survive you will toast you. ... And so, from an old disciple, an old student: Heres to Gordo! Hell outlast us all." -Air Mail

Author Bio

Gordon Lish is an acclaimed author and editor. A former editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf, he is celebrated for his notable work with authors including Raymond Carver, Denis Donoghue, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and Christine Schutt, among many others. His previous books include Dear Mr. Capote, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door, Extravaganza, White Plains, Peru, Zimzum, The Selected Stories of Gordon Lish, and more. He lives in New York.