Atticus Lish

Atticus Lish (born 1972 ) is an American novelist. His debut, Preparation for the Next Life, caught its independent publisher, Tyrant, "off guard" by becoming a surprise success, winning a number of awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Lish lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with his wife. He is the son of influential literary editor Gordon Lish.

Preparation for the Next Life

Preparation for the Next Life is set mostly in Flushing, Queens, and follows two new arrivals to the city. Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from the Chinese province of Xinjiang, daughter of a Uighur mother and a Han father. Brad Skinner is a Pennsylvania-born veteran of the Iraq war. While struggling to survive in New York's underground economy, Zou Lei meets Skinner, who is suffering from untreated combat trauma. Their attempts to build a life together, overcoming the violence, predation, and alienation surrounding them, amount to what Times critic Dwight Garner has called "perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade". The judges of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award praised the book for its blend of documentary detail and "incantation," stating that it "scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates."

Personal and family life Lish was born in Manhattan. Like his father, the younger Lish attended Phillips Academy, where he studied Mandarin. Lish describes his childhood as one of "huge privilege". Lish dropped out of Harvard University after two years. Lish married his wife, Beth, a Korean-born schoolteacher, in 1995. According to the Times, the death in 1994 of Gordon's wife, the mother of Atticus, led to a twelve-year estrangement between the two men. Lish maintains that the two have since reconciled, but that he would "absolutely not" have considered asking his well-respected father for help, either in writing or in marketing his work. However, after his manuscript was accepted by Tyrant's founder Giancarlo DiTrapano, Gordon Lish helped persuade his own literary agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban, to take his son on as a client. Urban has helped to sell British and French rights to Preparation for the Next Life,

Mixed martial arts career Lish spent six years training to become a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter, and continues to practice grappling, including Brazilian jiujitsu, in New York City gyms. According to a 'Talk of the Town' piece in The New Yorker, Lish owns a 1-1-0 record in professional M.M.A. bouts. 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Preparation for the Next Life 2015 Carla Furstenberg Cohen Literary Prize (given to authors of first or second books) 2015 New York City Book Award (Presented by the Society Library) 2016 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, Preparation for the Next Life