Gordon Lish's first novel tells the story of a serial killer who wants Truman Capote to write his biography. In the letter the killer writes to Capote, the details of his life and his modus operandi are revealed.

“The creative act par excellence.”—Denis Donoghue “ Extravaganza is the eeriest comic novel of our generation.”—Cynthia Ozick

What happens when the writer revisits the scene of a crime from a previous novel, a childhood murder dire with class conflict and dispassion for the disadvantaged? What happens when a boy with money runs into a boy without money runs into a boy with an impediment and all three run into a nanny with enumerated rules for play? What happens looking back when an old man, a young wife, and a ladder-climbing forensic psychiatrist mingle in triangle? In the hands of Gordon Lish, such a book rivets as the given terms tighten. It happens in a sandbox. It happens in Woodmere. Think contemporary master achieving feats with the art of story and the language traveled in our passage to ourselves. "In To Have Written a Book, his tumultuously moving newest novel, Gordon Lish augments his legacy." -- Cynthia Ozick "Lish is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist." -- Kirkus "The Guardian The US’s answer to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernard." -- The Guardian

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.