![]() ![]() His characters worked in diners and motels they had amputated limbs and their families had left them, with or without furniture their working lives, their cropped, half-understood thoughts had not been seen in fiction. ![]() Lish's own fiction – he wrote stories and novels – is compact, antic and self-reflexive, with titles such as Wouldn't A Title Just Make It Worse?.Ĭarver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. ![]() He went on to give writing workshops at which he managed, by all accounts, to be gnomic, crushing and inspiring in relatively equal measure. (They had met in Palo Alto, when Carver was, as his wife later put it, a "practising alcoholic" working at a textbook publisher's.) Lish later became an editor at Knopf and championed many other writers whose styles were unlike Carver's – Don DeLillo, for instance, and Richard Ford. The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential literary figure once known as Captain Fiction, had published Carver's first stories in Esquire magazine. Please hear me… I've looked at it from every side, I've compared both versions of the manuscripts… until my eyes are nearly to fall out of my head." The trouble was, Lish's version was so far from what Carver had sent him that Carver felt it was unrecognisable. ![]() "Dearest Gordon," it began, "I've got to pull out of this one. ![]()
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