Epigraph

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [xii], 155, [9]. Red paper backstrip over speckled, tan paper boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Deckled fore-edges. Jacket design by Leslie Dann and Guido Jiménez Cruz. Dedicated to Don DeLillo and Victoria Borus.

A novel in epistolary form. Lish remains a contentious literary figure with legendary editing stints at both Knopf and Esquire, with half his Columbia students swearing by him and the other half swearing at him.

"Is this the most painful, the most anguished, the most lacerating and self-lacerating book ever written? And – God help us – the 'funniest,' in the way Kafka is (damagingly) funny? Sometimes it makes you writhe and suffer. Sometimes it makes you laugh. And consider the language: the sentences, the cadences. The surprises of the surprises, the grotesqueries of the bizarre-ities (and vice versa). A new invention, catapulting into the blackest hole of all, grinning all the way." –Cynthia Ozick