Gordon Lish on Raymond Carver - Hmmm...

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kennyc

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Gordon Lish: ‘Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!’Christian Lorentzen talks to the legendary editor in an extract from a forthcoming issue of the Paris Review
Gordon Lish


‘I’m not a writer. I’ve no stake in my being thought of as a writer’ … Gordon Lish





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.”

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http://www.theguardian.com/books/20...editing-raymond-carver?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
 
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