Gordon Lish
Peru
A new edition, revised by the author

"In Peru, our fascination springs from the terror of compulsive memory and from the novelist's struggle to turn it into art. It is a struggle that Gordon Lish wins brilliantly." — Don DeLillo

In Gordon Lish's Peru, memory is the protagonist, elusive, miasmic, multilayered. At the novel's onset, the narrator announces, "There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it." Then gradually the childhood secret — real or imagined — unfolds. In 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox.

Peru's narrator weaves strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, eventually resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that spawned a killing: the sense of tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh.

Gordon Lish has concocted a distinctive narrative — ambiguous, complex, and brilliantly inventive. Throughout the eerie, circular monologue, Lish makes unnerving observations about memory, violence, obsession, and the potential horror behind the facade of an ordinary life.

Gordon Lish is the author of seven previously published works of fiction. All seven will be reissued by Four Walls Eight Windows, which published his most recent novel, Epigraph, in the fall of 1996. Together with his activities as an editor at Knopf (1977-1995), the editor of The Quarterly (1987 to present), and fiction editor at Esquire (1969-1977), his literary output has placed him at the forefront of the American literary scene.

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