Corner Kicker

Praise for Death and So Forth "Prickly and insightful, the collection reads like a biography told in vivid snapshots. Lish’s passion, incisiveness, and irascibility blaze through." -Publishers Weekly "Lish playfully makes tragic events funny or hopeful and often rendersthe profound inane. This is a story collection by a master of the craft and a fine late addendum toan incredible career." -Booklist "Now, at 87, feeling closer to his end than to his beginning and thrilled by the morbid drama of it all, Lish has written Death and So Forth, a new book of stories about Gordo that drops the curtain on his long performance. Or so the old vaudevillian would have us think. When a legendary rascal such as Lish puts death in the title of a book about a super-rascal such as Gordo, you can be sure he intends to live forever and is engaged in a Tom Sawyer–like prank, attending his own funeral in disguise. ... “Look, for my money, it’s all show business,” Gordo declares in a piece on Harold Bloom, the fabled Yale literary critic and one of the author’s late, lamented pals. He’s outlived a lot of them, and he’s happy to let us know it—Ken Kesey and Denis Johnson, to name a couple—because that’s what it means to be a man of letters of Lish’s still-consciously manly generation: you toast the ones who go before in the hopes that the ones who survive you will toast you. ... And so, from an old disciple, an old student: Here’s to Gordo! He’ll outlast us all." -Air Mail