Customer Reviews

Krupp's Lulu (Lish, Gordon)

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Gordon Lish's clear voice rings through the sea of mediocrity in today's fiction.He has no equals or imitators. He will tie your emotions in a knot and set you free.

Beautiful rambling comic narrative, revelatory in incremental layers, a kind of purity of speech I have rarely read. Lish is in love with language and the narrative itself, the act of telling, rather than with what is told. I ordered this book and read it straightaway and have re-read it once again. Deeply rewarding.

Gordon Lish may well be our last pure writer. He's not for everybody, thank goodness; but if you are a real reader, you will need this book.

There's no none like Lish. He is singular in his voice. Gregory Farnham's review here sounds like a digruntled writer -- did Lish ever reject him? Is that why "The Event" is publihsed by a third rate POD house that isn't selling for garbonzo beans? Nevertheless, I am a Lish fan and always will be. This is a good book. Pick it up.

Lish's Lulu stories reviewed here got him called a clown. Yes, like Chollie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sam Beckett. Lish's stuff has to be read as poetry is, for implications, with side vision, with one's intuition. Read Lish's stories the way Roethke reads the world: "I learn by going where there is to go," he says. Lish uses his IMAGINATION, fergodssakes, not this earth and its things. Lish shows again in this collection that he is one of our finest standup (at-the-keyboard) comics, and comedy is always a most serious event. There is no one like him, except for Beckett at his best, mostly in his plays. Those who cannot read Lish, cannot understand him, simply haven't kept up with the direction of literature and probably don't like Beckett, Amy Hempel, Don Barthleme, John Barth.... I keep Lish's books among all those books I love and will be buried with.

John Herrmann, Libby, Montana, author of (in Aug.2001) MURDER AT THE RED DOG.

One can't help but feel sorry for the stern, anxious, pompous looking man pictured on the cover of this book. The man's exaggerated pride barely conceals his fear -- fear that he will be found out, discovered to be less an author than a hapless, involuntary clown. The man, of course, is Gordon Lish, and the stories showcased in his new collection are slight, lazy and inept attempts to mimic the modern literature that he has apparently read but seems incapable of understanding.

The question arises, how did this embarrassing collection ever get published? The answer, I suspect, holds the key to Lish's entire literary career. Simply put, Lish gets these attempts at stories printed because in the Lilliputian world of contemporary American literature his position as an editor has made him a powerful man. His career thus resembles an extortion racket or a pyramid scheme rather than what we like to think of as a literary career. Fortunately, however, he can probably do less harm in literature than he could in crime.

Gregory Farnum, author of The Event.