SOURCE: "Going Crazy with Pencil and Paper," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 13, 1988, pp. 3, 7.

Harris, pseudonym of Donald Heiney, is an American novelist and critic. In the following essay, he offers a favorable review of the stories in Mourner at the Door.

By all evidence, Gordon Lish is a remarkable person. He is better known as an editor than as a fiction writer. For a number of years, he was the fiction editor of Esquire; more recently he has been an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and the founder and editor of The Quarterly, a magazine which has sought to bring the work of younger, often experimental American writers to the attention of a wider public. He has taught in various universities, and was at one time the director of linguistic studies at a research laboratory. As if this weren't enough, he is the author of two...