Atticus Lish

Atticus Lish is an American novelist and the son of literary agent and publisher Gordon Lish. His debut novel Preparation for the Next Life (2014) is a spare, intense love story between a Muslim Uyghur woman who has illegally emigrated to the United States and an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD, set against the backdrop of New York City's immigrant underground. The novel was published by Tyrant Books, a small independent press, and received extraordinary critical praise for its prose, its characterisation, and its moral seriousness. Preparation for the Next Life won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2015, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named among the best novels of the year by numerous publications. Lish's prose style—compressed, rhythmic, spare—is immediately recognisable and owes something to his father's editing philosophy of radical condensation. Lish's subsequent work has been slower to appear, in keeping with his reputation as a deliberate and painstaking craftsman. His second novel Wait Till You See Me Dance is a collection of linked stories. He lives and works in New York City.