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csi: books

"There Is Absolutely No Way To Tell Whose Hand Swiped That Black Marker Over Page After Page Of That Manuscript"

In response to our take on the tug of war over the publication of early drafts of Raymond Carver's best-known stories came a small excellent email: "As a grad student, I sat for a week in the Lilly Library at Indiana University poring over Gordon Lish's papers, after exactly what Tess Gallagher is/was/will be forever after—to expose Lish as the man behind the curtain and Caver as an unsullied genius. I read hardly anything in grad school but Carver and Faulkner (I know) and read anything I could get my hands on looking for the holy grail that is Authorial Intent. As I went through the Lish papers, reading manuscript copies of "The Bath"/"A Small, Good Thing" (where in the first Lish-edited version you don't know if Scotty dies and where in the second Carver reinstated the ending) I found lots of black ink, and a good 2000+ plus words of scenes and dialogue that didn't make it into any published draft I saw, but that significantly changed the story." More »

4:00 PM on Wed Oct 17 2007
By Emily Gould
4,309 views, 46 comments

Latest by girlish: So, here's the thing. Carver's first book was issued by McGraw Hill under the imprint, you guessed it, "A Gordon Lish Book". Reasonable to assume it got the same editing/rewriting treatment evident in the Lilly papers. (And yes, Gordon's handwriting - Pilot Razor Point - can be more »