Gordon Lish
Extravaganza
A Joke Book

"Lish's Extravaganza is the eeriest comic novel of our generation." — Cynthia Ozick

"Here is Lish at his most characteristic, mixing courage and exuberance, transgressing literary limits." — Harold Bloom

Gordon Lish's fifth work of fiction is a joke book of devastating power that looks at the greatest riddle of all — life itself. Extravaganza forsakes all conventional storytelling — it is a wildly lavish literary spectacular of originality and daring.

In the spirit of the vibrant theater that produced the likes of Jack Benny, Bert Lahr, Sophie Tucker, and Groucho Marx, Gordon Lish presents a series of discontinuous episodes featuring the vaudeville duo Smith & Dale, who distill the basic repertoire of the Borscht Belt — stereotypical New York Jewish and doctor/patient jokes, and gags about the wife, the tailor, and the barber. Lish's amazing allegory combines the tired with the bizarre, the mundane with the profound, the sublimely silly with references to mortality and the meaning of existence.

Order this featured book online at a discount from

---

© 2004 Four Walls Eight Windows
Home | Catalog | Subjects | Contact/Ordering | Internships | Submissions | Related | Search

Website design by JERRY ENGELBACH