Collected Fictions Vol. 2

Please see also: Collected fictions – Volume 1 and Selection of short stories read by Gordon Lish.

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: these are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and 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.

The second volume includes the stories from “After the Beanstalk” to “How the Sophist Got Spotted”.

Cover image adapted from a photo by Lainey Powell.

Collected Fictions Vol. 1

Please see also: Collected Fictions – Volume 2 and Selection of short stories read by Gordon Lish.

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: these are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and 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.

The first volume includes the stories from “How to Write a Poem” to “Fish Story”.

Cover image adapted from a photo by Lainey Powell.

Collected Fictions

This audiobook includes both volumes of the Collected Fictions, as well as a FREE audiobook of a selection of short stories narrated by Gordon Lish himself.

Each volume is also available separately for purchase. Just follow the links below!
– Collected Fictions Vol. 1
– Collected Fictions Vol. 2
Selection of Short Stories read by Gordon Lish

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: these are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and 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.

Cover image adapted from a photo by Lainey Powell.

All My Friends Are Superheroes

All Tom’s friends really are superheroes.

There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her.

So she’s moving to Vancouver. She’ll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards an airplane in Toronto. Tom has until the wheels touch the ground in Vancouver to convince her he’s visible, or he loses her forever.

Castle

“In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.” So begins, innocently enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping and brilliant new novel. Awkward, guarded, and more than a little adamant about his need for privacy, Eric Loesch sets about renovating a rundown old house in the small, upstate New York town where he spent his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers that there is a plot of dense forest smack in the middle of his land that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the person it belongs to is blacked out… The answer to what—and who—might lie at the heart of Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from an author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, “has enough electricity to light up the country.”

The Edge of Eden

Life starts to unravel for Penelope when her husband, Rupert, drags their family to the remote Seychelles islands for an exotic diplomatic job in 1960. While Penelope pines for London, Rupert and their two daughters fall in love with this tropical paradise. The children run barefoot on the beach and become enraptured by the ancient magic, or grigri, that pervades this lush colonial outpost. Rupert, meanwhile, succumbs to the island’s other lures when a Seychelloise beauty sets her sights—and casts her spells—on him.

But Penelope and her daughter Zara won’t go down without a fight. In a desperate attempt to hold the family together, they each turn secretly to the local witchcraft with devastating results. Ultimately, Penelope and her family suffer unimaginable consequences that change their lives forever.

Benedict’s acerbic wit and evocative descriptions serve up a page-turner brimming with jealousy, sex, and intrigue in this ominous Eden.

Icelander

The daughter of a local legend of the investigative arts, Our Heroine searches for her dog while avoiding her biological impulse to solve the mystery of her best friend’s recent murder.

So establishes the baseline of Icelander, which pulsates even more deeply with Norse legend, an alternate reality and a cast of supporting characters including a “rogue library-scientist,” a pair of philosophical investigators, and a many-faced villain. Built on mazes of time, language, and narrator, this literary fireworks display shows you what might happen if Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple had been penned by Nabokov then run through Hitchcock’s lens.

Cover image adapted from photos by Bradley Gordon and Bjørn Giesenbauer.

The Impossibly

With the literary inventiveness of Paul Auster and the dark absurdity of Kafka, Laird Hunt’s impressive debut is a smart, funny noir that is as fittingly spare as a bare ceiling light. Deadpan delivery and a sly eye for detail characterize The Impossibly’s anonymous narrator, and when the nameless operative botches an assignment for the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life—including his girlfriend—is revealed to be either true-blue, double operative, or both. The narrator’s final chilling assignment—to identify his own assassin—masterfully dismantles the reader’s own analysis of the evidence. This is a fresh, daring love story set in a world of crime and deep confusion, told by an unreliable and not-unhumorous individual, who is more interested in love than in crime and is clearly ill-equipped for both.

Wild Turkey

Phil Lansdale has problems. He’s out of a job, his son’s a pyromaniac, and his wife is running out of excuses as to why she comes home six hours late from work every night.

In his newly appointed house-husband position, Phil learns that when you have a lot of time on your hands, you begin to notice your neighbors, their intricate nuances, and the discord created by someone who doesn’t follow the normal routine-like the long and sexy neighbor across the street, Cassandra Payne.

Phil and his new found friend, Bryan, an ex-detective who lives next door, have been keeping tabs on Cassandra. But when Cassandra’s husband is gunned down, Phil and Bryan realize that the beautiful Cassandra might be hiding more beneath that eensy-weensy miniskirt than meets the eye, and Phil finds himself drawn into the dark and mysterious world of Cassandra Payne.

With a bottle of bourbon and a full tank of gas, Phil sets out to find the gunman and discovers the truth in a world where some men are men, some are wild, and some are only turkeys.