GOINGS: IN THIRTEEN SITTINGS

It's impossible to read Lish without feeling at once bewildered, scandalized, amazed, and enlivened. GOINGS is a modernist masterpiece not for the faint of heart.

GOINGS: In Thirteen Sittings is Gordon Lish's first completely original work in sixteen years, a baker's dozen of fictions that will secure his reputation as a unique prose stylist. Lish is known for championing the work of many of the country's foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, to Anne Carson and Ben Marcus, as a teacher, at the publisher Knopf, and as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname "Captain Fiction").

Lish's skill as an editor feeds his genius as a writer—he expresses himself, if not fearlessly, then often with dazzling bluntness. Lish is equally fascinated with and distrustful of the act of writing, and his sentences are styled to undermine himself as writer and to untether readers from their trust in their narrator. Our protagonist, Gordon (Gordon!), recurs in a series of situations, as a horny sevenyearold lusting for his "lusciously meager" piano teacher, as a widower in an awkward encounter with an old flame, and as a quizzical child asking its mother about death. Lish's disarming prose style makes amiliar literary subjects— families, ageing, memory, the self—fresh.

It's impossible to read Lish without feeling at once bewildered, scandalized, amazed, and enlivened. GOINGS is a modernist masterpiece not for the faint of heart.

Gordon Lish is the author of Collected Fictions, Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door, Extravaganza, My Romance, Zimzum, Epigraph, Arcade, SelfImitation of Myself, and Krupp's Lulu. This body of work, together with his provocative activities as a teacher and editor, have placed him at the forefront of the American literary scene.