Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential editors of our era, Gordon Lish has quite simply changed the face of American literature. The stunning list of writers with whom he has worked closely includes Harold Brodkey, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and many more. But it is in his own writing that his genius is made manifest. There, his quick wit and black humor are on full display, as well as a merciless intellect that skewers no one so thoroughly as, and more often than, a narrator most often known as "Gordon." In the stories in Goings, Lish wrestles with memory; self-knowledge (the lack and the impossibility thereof); friendship; mothers, sons and lovers. More than that, the language here is a collective paradigm of Lishian prose: a great writer's attempt to leap off the page.

"A list. What could be more basic than a list? And a list by Lish is sure to intrigue. In this, Lish's latest work, he delivers a characteristic exhibition of his peculiar deformities of candor, obsession, and wit, via two extended "notes" to the reader, including a pages-long list of essential but perplexing words. Amidst this stream of apparent incongruities, the alert reader will discover an accruing narrative involving the narrator's late, beloved Aunt Adele-a medal-bedecked spy for the National Reconnaissance Office-and cryptography, love, poetry, and of course: the nature of language"--Amazon.com.

Call it zimzum : how we manage the scandal of our progress from desire to the void, through contraction and distractedness. In this perilously original work, composed of six rigorously crafted parts—and informed by a desperately libidinous, grotesquely comic rage—one of the most controversial figures in contemporary American letters brilliantly captures our humanity and Zeitgeist . Central to the novel is the ravishing shriek of a man who seeks to preserve what little there is left to him. It is as if his head were in an ever-tightening vise as he frantically seeks connection with others, knowing all the while the futility of the enterprise. He yearns for some carnal knowledge. He is obsessed with the successful operation of a sexual device. His lover is insensitive, self-absorbed. What is he—a former insane asylum inmate, whose motto used to be "share and share alike," but is now "fair is fair"—supposed to do? Exuberant in the music of its ordinary utterances, anguished and poignant in its declaration of the facts of life, Zimzum is Lish's most compelling novel.