Mourner at the Door - Softcover

Lish, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140106804 ISBN 13: 9780140106800

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1989

Synopsis

A collection of stories by the author of "Dear Mr. Capote" and "Peru" captures the significance of the trivial details and everyday experiences that often add up to create the majority of an individual's memories

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The guru of one school of contemporary short story writers weighs in here with a collection of 27 short pieces that are so mannered and monotonous as to seem parodies of the storytelling art. In most of them, the narrator addresses the reader directly and insistently, in a colloquial voice that hammers like a dentist's drill. Sentences are either short and choppy, repeating over and over again like a nervous tic, with the addition of a few words each time: ("Picture Florida. Picture Miami Beach, Florida. Picture a shitty little apartment in a big crappy building . . ."); or a long, run-on stream of consciousness, equally laden with obscenities or scatological terms. A story called "Shit" begins: "I like talking about people sitting on toilets." "Mr. and Mrs. North" concerns a couple who vomit every morning when they get up. Lish treats family relationships much in the manner of a standup comic, even in the several pieces that have autobiographical overtones. An embarrassing vignette consists almost entirely of women's names, in which the name Barbara is repeated several times, and ends: "I . . . finally offered marriage to a person whose name was thus." The book's dedication reads "For Brodkey, Ozick, DeLillo, and to Barbara, first, last and always." There is one funny tale in which a hapless woman returns from Acapulco with an ailing chihuahua; it takes a vet to tell her that her pet is a rat. This collection rarely rises higher than that level.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0140106804
• ISBN 13: 9780140106800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176