Gordon Lish, one of the most influential literary editors of the late 20th century, will take on students for a summer course in imaginative writing at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction next June. Prospective students are invited to submit a three-page writing sample to the Mercantile; those accepted will meet with Lish for 12 six-hour sessions from June 1 to August 17. (Tuition is $2800; college credit may be available in applicable situations.)
Here’s how the Mercantile summarizes Lish’s career:
“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… 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.”
He is also the author of seven novels and five short-story collections. (You may recall the hubbub last year over Lish’s editing of Carver’s earliest short stories, and whether or not the author’s original versions should have seen the light of day.)