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.

No Lease on Life

The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay.

The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the mean-spirited landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life.

Though Elizabeth fights on for normalcy and sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own.

Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America’s toughest, hottest melting pot.

Cover image adapted from a photo by madabandon.

Someday This Will Be Funny

The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

Cover background image by Charles Orr

Suicide Casanova

What do Gary Condit, Woody Allen, and O.J. Simpson have in common with Leslie Cauldwell, protagonist of Nersesian’s latest offering? They are Suicide Casanovas. What compels powerful men in the prime of their professional lives to risk so much? Following the commercial success of his first three novels (Manhattan Loverboy, The Fuck-Up, and dogrun,), Nersesian’s new novel is a psychosexual thriller, a dramatic departure from his youthful black comedies: Humbert Humbert without the pedophile penchant, Hannibal Lechter without the appetitite.

Corporate attorney Leslie Cauldwell is middle-aged, handsome, and rich, but has only a few swipes left on his mental Metrocard. During a rough sex session, he garrotes his beloved wife; now he’s an officially designated “sex offender,” off on a bender, looking for love in all the wrong places. Twenty years earlier, when his office was high above the pornographic purgatory of Times Square, Leslie became involved with the adult-film star, Sky Pacifica. She needed a refuge, and he was ripe for the using. Following a brief fling, each went their own way. Two decades later, in 2001, Leslie is still working in Times Square — recently sanitized with its ESPN Zone and MTV window — and fraught with guilt about his “accident” with his wife.

Like Jay Gatsby pursuing an erotic American dream, Leslie, with the help of a private detective, hunts down Sky Pacifica, his latter-day Daisy. Across a landscape of S&M mistresses and porn producers, from L.A. of the ’80s to New York of the new millennium, we see a modern-day tale of love and loss, innocence and corruption, crime and redemption.

Cover photo by John Manoogian.