LORNA SORE

I ate deer and my first pulled pork sandwich. It was from Interstate Bar-b-que in Memphis.

James Yeh tagged me in this game where you say seven things about yourself, but seven things! In public! Here are some true things, though: Last night I ate a duck. I am reading Distortions by Ann Beattie, who was once married to David Gates. I got the book free from Bookmooch. Heidi Julavits has a great story in the January Harpers. it’s called The Santosbrazzi Killer. If that link doesn’t work, email me or comment and I will send you the story as a PDF (holiday gift). This is a picture of me with Lawrence’s sister’s cat Lucy, in Lawrence’s childhood bedroom, writing this post. She is a very talky cat and helps me cope with the fact that Stephen and Stephen’s Friend are in small cages back in Brooklyn. I wish these statements were true of me: “laid-back, cool and collected” and “He gives off a little oasis of calm.”

The Mercantile Library of NY
Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
212-755-6710
www.mercantilelibrary.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:

Noreen Tomassi
212-755-6710

RENOWNED WRITING TEACHER GORDON LISH WILL EMERGE FROM RETIREMENT TO LEAD A WRITING CLASS IN SUMMER 2009 IN NEW YORK CITY

December 11, 2008 — The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, the only literary arts center in the United States devoted entirely to the art of fiction, announces that author, editor, and renowned writing teacher Gordon Lish will lead a class beginning in June 1, 2009 and ending August 17, 2009. The class will meet on Mondays from 5pm to approximately 11 pm. Tuition for the 72-hour course is $2800. College credit may be available through the experiential learning division of universities and colleges.

Applicants are asked to send a three-page writing sample by January 30, 2009 to Noreen Tomassi at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017. For more information, visit www.mercantilelibrary.org or email us at info@mercantilelibrary.org.

About Gordon Lish
From 1986 to 1996, Gordon Lish was founder and editor of The Quarterly. He was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf from 1977 to 1995 and fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977. He is the author of the novels Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, Extravaganza, My Romance, Arcade, Zimzum, and Epigraph; the short-story collections Mourner at the Door, Selected Stories, Self-Imitation of Myself, Krupp’s Lulu, and What I Know So Far; and editor of the anthologies New Sounds in American Fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times: with an introduction by Tom Wolfe, and All Our Secrets Are the Same. Lish has taught imaginative writing at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, and is known for his many years of presenting private classes, each session of which was six to ten and a half hours in duration. No few of Lish’s students have gone on to notable careers in writing and teaching.

While at Esquire, Lish championed the work of Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Harold Brodkey, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, and Raymond Carver, and brought out, while at Knopf, books by Denis Donoghue, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Sheila Kohler, Lily Tuck, Dawn Raffel, Anne Carson, Raymond Kennedy, Thomas Lynch, Ben Marcus, Walter Kirn, Christine Schutt, Roy Blount, and others. Lish is the source of the information that he was fired from every job he ever had.

This is me and a unicorn at P.S.1 on Saturday.

Tao Lin wrote a review of Woodcutters: “Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard has maybe the most shit-talking (percentage-wise) out of the books I have read or movies I have seen. The level of shit-talking in Woodcutters is perhaps equal to some Gmail chats or online message boards, I believe, but the sentences are longer and the shit-talking is done by a man in his 50’s (I think) and also it is sustained for around 200 pages within a concrete situation. The narrator’s shit-talking seems ‘uncontrollable.’”

(That line reminds me that shit-talking is controllable, and that I should probably watch my mouth, and so in addition to being entertaining, this review provided an important public service. Now I have blogged about Tao Lin.)