Gordon Lish

There are editors, and there is Gordon Lish, said

in Publishers Weekly. Across five decades, Lish has become widely known as one of the most exacting shapers of prose alive and for assisting— especially during his reign as Esquire’s fiction editor in the 1970s—in transforming Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver from unknowns into enduring stars. Though the 83-year-old New Yorker has authored more than a dozen novels and story collections himself, he insists he’s not worthy of being labeled a writer. “There’s a Yiddish word, patzer, somebody who horses around, plays, moves a thing here, moves a thing there—who devises what would seem a personality via language,” he says. “But do I have, can I do, any of the things those people I admire do? No, not by a long chalk.”

Lish also resists simple categorization of his latest book, White Plains: Pieces & Witherlings. The book’s 22 short varied pieces read like semiautobiographical fiction, but Lish doesn’t readily confirm that interpretation. “I would take the view that everything that we say is a fiction and in that sense autobiographical,” he recently told an interviewer for Ireland’s RTÉ Radio. But regarding at least one aspect of writing, he is utterly consistent: He cannot stop fiddling with it. “I rework and rework and rework, and there’s not anything in the book that I would not rework in this instant if I had it in hand,” he says. “It may be in so doing I would bring about a more acceptable text, or on the contrary a more repugnant one. I simply can’t leave it alone. I revise and revise and revise.”