Dear Mr. Truman / Missives from a Murderer

 

MISSIVES FROM A MURDERER

By George Stade

• June 12, 1983
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DEAR MR.CAPOTE, By Gordon Lish. 258 pp. New York: A William Abrahams Book/ Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $15.95.

Gordon LISH

''DEAR MR. CAPOTE'' may well turn out to be one of the best first novels of the year, in spite of its title. Although it is written in the form of a letter to Truman Capote, it is by no means an exercise in camp. And there are other surprises: It is original in style and detail, even though its given is a staple of formula fiction, even though its narrator, ''Yours Truly,'' expresses himself almost entirely through stock phrases, through dead or mixed metaphors. It is also a real grabber, well able to stir your deepest wells of pity and horror, even though its central character is a creep, a nerd, a pipsqueak, a henpecked and penny-pinching bank clerk, a madman who has murdered 23 women.

Gordon Lish / Famous for all the wrong reasons

 

Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish: famous for all the wrong reasons

This article is more than 11 years old

This great man of American letters should be judged by his body of work and the success of his students, not by his editing of Raymond Carver

David Winters

Thursday 29 August 2013

Now approaching his 80th year, the writer, teacher and editor Gordon Lish has dedicated his life to redefining the frontiers of American fiction. It's no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first. Mention Lish to most readers, though, and they'll react in one of two ways: if not with a flummoxed "Who?" then worse, with an "Oh … do you mean the guy who chopped Raymond Carver?"

 

Gordon LISH

A LIFE IN

Gordon Lish: ‘Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!’

This article is more than 9 years old

Christian Lorentzen talks to the legendary editor in an extract from a forthcoming issue of The Paris Review

This article is more than 9 years old

Christian Lorentzen

5 December 2015

It’s the custom for editors to keep a low profile and to underplay any changes they may make to an author’s manuscript. Gordon Lish is a different animal. Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous – or notorious – as a sculptor of other people’s prose. As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of the Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past 50 years, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah and Joy Williams. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2004, Hannah said: “Gordon Lish was a genius editor. A deep friend and mentor. He taught me how to write short stories. He would cross out everything so there’d be like three lines left, and he would be right.”