SOURCE: "The School of Gordon Lish," in An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-century Literature, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987, pp. 251-63.

Birkerts is an American critic. In the following excerpt, he traces Lish's influence as an editor and fiction writer.

When I had my interview with Arnold Gingrich at Esquire and he asked me what kind of fiction I was going to be publishing, I said, "The new fiction." He said, "What's that?" I said, "I'll get out there and find it, Mr. Gingrich."

—Lish

Longtime readers of American fiction will probably have noticed certain changes in the product during the last few decades. A good deal of the gravity, scope, and narrative energy seems to have gone out of our prose. Formerly there were lives, fates. Now, increasingly, we greet disembodied characters who move about in a generic sort of present. Events on the page are dictated...