Over the next month, Book Culture is proud to be hosting two (two!) events in conjunction with our favorite radical publisher, OR Books, the first with (in)famous editor/writer Gordon Lish and the second with Jewish anti-Zionist provocateur Norman Finkelstein.
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Gordon Lish is now best known for his work as an editor—most famously, and controversially, of Raymond Carver—and as a teacher. His own writing—sometimes compared to that of Stein, Beckett and Thomas Bernhardt—remained out of print until the publication by OR of his Collected Fictions in 2010. Dalkey Press followed in 2013 with their reissue of his novel Peru, and OR has just released his first original work in sixteen years, Goings: In Thirteen Sittings, a faux-memoir in which an eighty-year old Gordon gleefully revisits the malignant passions of his youth. Lish will be at Book Culture on April 23rd to read from his new book.
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Norman Finkelstein has for many years been the bête noir of American Zionism. Finkelstein’s doctoral thesis was a critique of Joan Peters’ 1984 work From Time Immemorial, which sought to delegitimize Arab claims to Palestinian identity, and since then Finkelstein has continued to spar with prominent Zionists. While Finkelstein’s work successfully discredited Peters, his own work (including The Holocaust Industry and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (both published by Verso) has consistently been a target of attack by Zionist intellectuals, and in 2007, he was denied tenure at DePaul University following pressure by Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel and others.
Read the full announcement on the Book Culture blog.