Atticus Lish is a new master of heart and compassion and pure power. Here, now, is Atticus Lish: working such shock and awe, mixed with poetic holy grace, going from the lyric Chinese interiority of the heroine (Zou Lei), to the pure shell-shocked bodily muscle of an American sublime madman soldier (Skinner).

Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life. Tyrant Books, 2014.


excerpt

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Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.

Lish (Life Is with People) turns to fiction with this stunning debut novel that plums the underbelly of New York City, tracing the relationship of Zou Lei, a Chinese immigrant working in a tiny noodle restaurant, and Skinner, an AWOL Iraqi war veteran and wanderer. Enduring stints in prison and homelessness, Zou Lei and Skinner experience life on society's fringes. Lish destroys the American dream with struggles his characters face—for Zou Lei, it's enough to survive: "forget living like and American. It was enough to be free on the streets." New York City is anything but idyllic; through the perspective of the two protagonists, it is frightening and cruel and alien. Zou Lei and Skinner have their budding relationship tested by insurmountable odds, and their own foibles and peculiarities are rendered with vivid detail. Lish's prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary. - Publishers Weekly

So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. "Preparation for the Next Life" is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book.––Joy Williams

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one. -Sam Lipsyte

The “next life” of Atticus Lishs novel is the one you have to die to know. Its also the next civilian life of a soldier ravaged by three tours in Iraq, and the dodgy life of an immigrant in the citys sleepless boroughs. The work is violent, swift, and gloriously descriptive. It is love story and lament, a haunting record of unraveling lives. Lish says starkly and with enormous power: the spirit prevails until it doesnt. A stunning debut. - Noy Holland

An illegal Chinese immigrant meets a broken American warrior, and the great love story of the 21st century begins. The intersection of their paths seems inevitable, irrevocable. Their story: tender, violent, terrible, and beautiful. Atticus Lish's prose, lyrical and taut, sentences as exact and indisputable as chemical formulas, is trance-like, evangelical in its ability to convert and convince its reader. Preparation for the Next Life is that rare novel that grabs you by the shirt and slaps you hard in the face. Look, it says. It isn't pretty. Turn away at your own risk. In case you haven't noticed, the American Dream has become a nightmare. Atticus Lish has your wake up call. He has created a new prototype of the hero, and her journey provides us with a devastating perspective on the "promised land" of the post 9/11 U.S., where being detained is a rite of passage and the banality of violence is simply part of the pre-apocalyptic landscape. - Christopher Kennedy

Atticus Lish has written the most relevant, and beautiful, novel of the year. -Scott McClanahan

"Lish (Life Is with People) turns to fiction with this stunning debut novel that plumbs the underbelly of New York City, tracing the relationship of Zou Lei, a Chinese immigrant working in a tiny noodle restaurant, and Skinner, an AWOL Iraqi war veteran and wanderer. Enduring stints in prison and homelessness, Zou Lei and Skinner experience life on society's fringes. Lish destroys the American dream with the struggles his characters face — for Zou Lei, it's enough to survive: 'forget living like an American. It was enough to be free on the streets.' New York City is anything but idyllic; through the perspective of the two protagonists, it is frightening and cruel and alien. Zou Lei and Skinner have their budding relationship tested by insurmountable odds, and their own foibles and peculiarities are rendered with vivid detail. Lish's prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary. - Publishers Weekly

Preparation for the Next Life is a masterwork. This book comes to terrify writers of the sort of Don Delillo, Eugene Marten (if one can remember their names after reading Atticus), and the multitudinous folderol of realism. Here’s a love story for the lovers—but also our first-great-American masterpiece of the new world qua terror, living in terror, the might of the glorious city of New York. I’m terrorized standing in the heroic shadow of our protagonist fellow, in the crazed-yet-controlled free-moving vastness of the styles of Atticus’s prose, of the magnificence, good God, what else can be said, sheer magnificence! This is the first book that terrorized me and flagellated me to standing, roaming about my house, not sleeping, declaring “My God, My God, he has done it!” Crafted with such power and grace, one can remember one’s first moments, gripped by the first book (for me it was Cuckoo’s Nest), which turned a person onto the possibilities of literature. Atticus Lish is head and neck and muscle and grace above the others–he’s written the first post-national American novel. - Luke B. Goebel

There is no hope to better one's station through hard work. Opportunities are limited to whatever those exploiting your labor are willing to give you. For those who've immigrated into the United States illegally, whose available community does not necessarily have the best interests of others at heart, hard work might be a habit, but minus any chance to ever save money up money, the only redemption possible is through some form of grace: the feeling of freedom that has no relationship to economic realities, and simply stems from being alive in a country that you have chosen.
Preparation for the Next Life focuses on Zou Lei, a Chinese Muslim of the Uighur tribe, who has made her way to New York City after sneaking over the border from Mexico. She has been detained before, and is haunted be the fear of being caught again, as she works in the back of a restaurant and pays $100 a week to sleep in one box of many in a small apartment. Absent any chance to change her station, the possibility of love remains as something that could theoretically change her life. Such possibility enters into her life through a PTSD-afflicted veteran of the Iraq war, Skinner, whose privileged status as a war hero has given him the option to live in the relative privacy of a basement apartment and take medication.
The book's heart lies in the love between the two of them, which is warm and tender the way the rest of its world isn't. Theirs is a relationship built on a shared knowledge of the world's frustrations that circumvents any communication issues through the mechanics of bodies touching. Besides sex, they bond over exercise, passing body builder magazines back and forth, and she collects the bottles and cans scattered around his bed for the recycling deposit. Through regimens and routine, self-improvement is sought, existing coterminous with some form of release.
The activity of the book is a sense of pacing around, going on long walks, with anger inside, fists in pockets, beating up your body just by being in the world. For the tenderness that passes between the two of them does not extend to their ability to treat themselves better. Exercise is one of several habits whereby they do violence to themselves. Zou Lei works consistently in falling apart shoes and their lack of support makes her legs ache. Skinner smokes cigarettes, Zou Lei tells him he should quit; he agrees but cannot. The book's sentences are written with the rhythm of push-ups, the default exercise of the confined man: a way of pushing against the boundaries imposed on you by pushing against oneself and one's own weight. The writing is lyrical, but angry; muscular, exhausted. It is unremittingly consistent in its tone and language, realistic about its world and the characters' prospects within it, and unsqueamish about the perceptions of other races that arises unthinkingly in urban living.
Outside each other's presence, out in the larger world, Skinner is viewed as the mentally unstable traumatized dude he is. Drinking to dull certain pains, he reveals himself unrepentant of the violent actions he's performed in the line duty, stored as images on his phone. Meanwhile the people who live upstairs from him see Zou Lei and assume she is delivering food, or else she is a prostitute.
Love could be redemptive, maybe, if what it had to fight against was not so long a list. And maybe in the end it is, depending on how we take the title, how much we, as readers taking the place of an omniscient judge, are willing to forgive. But eventually the violence confined inside rubs up against the freedom to walk around, and having found an outlet, explodes. The gun Skinner carries around is in time emptied. You prepare for the next life by coming to some sort of peace, but for the time being, the life we are living now is to be defined by its opposite. - Brian Nicholson

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it’s smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. Preparation for the Next Life, Atticus Lish’s first novel, dwells on the edges of New York City where the Third World still persists, inhabited by petty criminals, remnants of the old white working class, military castoffs and polyglot swarms of immigrants, many of them illegal. In this regard, the story Lish tells is reminiscent of Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, a classic late-twentieth-century narrative of the Third World colliding with the First.
Like Banks, Lish puts his protagonists on a path to convergence. The trajectory of Iraq War veteran Brad Skinner is the more familiar, since the travails and neglect of such wounded soldiers have recently been much reported, in the press and in other works of fiction. Skinner has seen his friend blown up in action and has been severely wounded himself, but none of that will get him a discharge, even after his enlistment is up. Called back to another combat tour under the “stop-loss” program, he performs poorly, kills in cold blood and alienates his surviving comrades. Finally released from the military, he arrives in New York as an efficient killing machine, slightly damaged by hard use, inadequately regulated by a fundamentally decent heart and a troubled mind that has found no healing, “holding on to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.”
Zou Lei comes to New York straight out of immigration detention, and her path to the metropolis is longer than Skinner’s: her childhood was spent in China’s northwest borderlands, in a cultural mélange of Tibetans, Uzbeks, Uighurs and the ever-expanding Han Chinese. Her mother is a Uighur of Siberian ancestry, her father a Chinese soldier, much revered though seldom seen. “Where she was from,” Zou Lei reflects later on, “a man and a woman might live apart for many years, due to economic reasons, only seeing each other once or twice a year when they were given permission by the authorities.” From her father, the child Zou Lei learns to venerate the order, discipline and security that the military seems to offer, though he is killed when she is still quite small. With her mother, she works in Shenzen factory- prisons and, when that fails, harvests litter for recycling. Some girls opt for prostitution, but Zou Lei refuses. “If you wanted heaven,” goes a local saying, “maybe you shouldn’t have come. There’s always America, if you think your feet will carry you.”
Zou Lei eventually infiltrates the United States and works her way up the East Coast among flocks of migrant workers speaking a babel of Asian dialects. The Uighurs are an Islamic tribe unwelcome in secular Chinese society and most other places, so among the migrants Zou Lei identifies with her Chinese side. She speaks a little of a half-dozen languages, but of course she has no legal existence. Picked up in a routine sweep, she is imprisoned for a length of time she has no way to quantify and told by her fellow detainees, “No one knows what will happen to you.” Released without any explanation, she bolts for the Asian souks of New York. “She was never going to get arrested again. She was going to stay where everybody was illegal just like her and get lost in the crowd and keep her head down. Forget living like an American. It was enough to be free and on the street.”
Skinner meets her by chance while he’s wandering aimlessly and Zou Lei is taking a break in a stairwell from her job in one of a cluster of food stands jumbled into a basement in Flushing’s Chinatown. Their first attraction is physical in a very particular way: Skinner is a bodybuilder and Zou Lei trains fanatically—as best she can with no equipment and shoes that cut her feet—in emulation of her soldier father and in service to her personal idealization of military life. Skinner is fascinated when she shows him a little of what she can do, and besides, his deranged demeanor has not proved attractive to any other woman. All things considered, Zou Lei could dream of no better partner than a veteran of the world’s most overwhelming military.
But their relationship is doomed, and not only by Skinner’s steadily worsening post-traumatic stress disorder. That syndrome has been well represented in literature since Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” and more recently brought to national attention by the scandals involving the Veterans Health Administration and Walter Reed National Medical Center, as well as Roxana Robinson’s fine novel Sparta. Lish covers it exhaustively and compellingly: the dreams, flashbacks, bone-wracking anxiety and, worst of all, paralytic depression. Skinner’s been handed a basket of pills (Zoloft, Ambien, Seroquel) with little instruction on their use, and he self-medicates energetically, with pot and lots of alcohol. With a letter declaring that his mental problems have nothing to do with the war, the Defense Department washes its hands of him.
Zou Lei recognizes the problem—“Something has shook your mind,” she says—but her love, though steadfast, is not enough to see him through the depths of depression, long periods when he can’t respond to her at all, in spite of his great longing for love. “The world was dull or annoying to him, and she was just like any other female, he felt: she had certain functions. And he had seen those functions turned inside out by high explosives, he knew what was inside people, and there was nothing.” Against this crippling loss of feeling, Zou Lei’s belief that “they could form an army of their own, a two-person unit, to fight these difficult battles involving his mental recovery and her immigration status” still appeals to her but not to him. Her image of the two of them (based on the nomadic Tibetan women she saw in her childhood) “traveling from city to city,” “wearing sheath knives and cowboy hats and riding horses in a sun-filled land outside the reach of the authorities,” can’t leave the world of fantasy.
Skinner would normalize her status by marriage, but—Catch-22—one can’t get married without a legal identity, and Zou Lei has none. As the two revolve around this conundrum, they are quietly stalked by Jimmy Turner (a k a Murphy), recently returned from prison to his family home in a worn-out Irish quarter of Queens, where Skinner rents a basement apartment. Jimmy has learned from the prison gangs: “We’ve declared war on the United States. This organization is bigger than the United States…. This is a structure. We’re like Al Qaida…. We control the drugs, we control the individuals. We control ourselves. People fear us, in here and on the street.” His intentions are purely predatory: he covets Skinner’s apartment for himself, while Zou Lei is simply prey to him, as she intuitively grasps when they first glimpse each other: “If a girl is traveling in the steppe and she sees nothing but a single moving dot in the distance, the dot sees her. Stag, man, wolf.”

* * *

The pure existential hostility of that environment re-emerges in the burgeoning streets of the decaying neighborhoods that Lish describes exhaustively and passionately, inch by inch. His rendition of the full texture of street life is extraordinary. Here he is, writing in close detail:
There were alleys going in from the street where immigrants could get their hair done or buy their kind of music. They sold jeans and lingerie and cell phones and high heels and glass pipes and Spanish romances in the street, a man with a mustache seizing a raven-haired woman by the hips, thrusting his hand down into the open neck of her peasant blouse. The mannequins had arched asses and torpedo breasts and stood on their toes and wore big black wigs and supersonic glasses.
Here he is, writing in panorama:
The city was uncontained. It covered a massive area and graded out into the world. There was no definite end at the horizon. There were more buildings, miles of them, covering the earth on into the distance. She saw the areas of trees, the shade of wood, the intricate fuzziness of the branches from this distance in among the houses. The highways—massive, industrial, and lonely—were to her left. To her right, there seemed to be still another city and then, past it, the skyline of Manhattan.
In this vision, Zou Lei “beheld what was possible,” except that it isn’t necessarily possible for her. In one way or another, all the principal characters are excluded from any social contract. Some have quietly fallen out of it, like Jimmy’s parents and sister, while some have been forcibly ejected, like Jimmy himself and like Skinner, used, abused and abandoned by the military. Some, like Zou Lei and the swarms of illegal immigrants surrounding her, never signed up at all. Zou Lei, almost literally, has nothing but her body, and Lish evokes this fearsome predicament as few have done before. Escaping from an assault by Jimmy, Zou Lei abandons her few possessions and runs barefoot halfway across Queens, in a grindingly realistic reprise of a fairy tale told by her mother, in which the heroine must run across an “iron desert” that “tore the soles of her feet.” Fairy tales have magical solutions; this story, emphatically, does not.
The members of our polymorphous underclasses most often appear as statistics; in presenting a few of them as individuals, Lish offers his audience a salubrious shock. In Zou Lei’s China, oppression is systematically produced and applied by the state. In the twenty-first-century United States, oppression is disorganized, random and proceeds largely through neglect. Still, it crushes plenty of people. The wretched of the earth are here among us, for the most part silenced—but with this novel, Lish has given them an unmistakable voice.
The title (derived from a sign on a mosque that Zou Lei briefly visits) remains inscrutable. Skinner’s only connection to a worldview permitting reincarnation is his tattoo in Chinese characters, translating as “No Pain, No Gain.” Zhou Lei has just a few fragments of folklore remembered from her Uighur mother—that and her fierce determination to survive and to live in freedom. This wrenching story seems to conclude that there is no life but this one. - Madison Smartt Bell   

Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish, is an astounding first novel about a world so large there is, sometimes, nowhere to go; a world so small the people in it, sometimes, get lost. The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. It is a love story, a war story, a tale of New York City in which familiar streets become exotic, mysterious, portentous, foul, magnificent. Some of it reads like poetry. All of it moves with a breathless momentum.
The novel begins with the story of Zou Lei, a woman from a remote desert area of northwestern China inhabited by tribal nomads and herdsmen, horse traders who pay no attention to national borders, whose ancient languages overlap: 
The word for man was adam. Apple was alma. Silk, yurt, camel, and khan were pronounced the same in Uzbek and in Uighur. Tibetan women hiked up from Qinghai, carrying blankets and silver things to sell, wearing black cowboy hats and sheath knives… 
The songs were the same. The girls sang them turning around, looking over their shoulders, coins around their heads.
Like most of those living in the area, Zou Lei’s mother is a Muslim, a Uighur. The stories she tells her daughter are ancient folktales, stories of Siberian ancestors, traders on the Silk Road. Zou Lei’s father is a Han soldier whom she reveres but rarely sees. On those rare occasions when he is on leave, he teaches her to do pull-ups, holding his child up to reach the iron bar.
Zou Lei’s mother tells her a story about a girl whose father is kidnapped by a witch. The only way the girl can find him is by traveling west, walking across deserts of glass and iron. Exhausted after seven years, she is about to give up when she is rescued by a bird flying above her, shading her way with its wings from then on. The journey west, so familiar for Americans, is given a universal impulse by Lish. After her parents die, Zou Lei herself goes west, to America, one more pioneer, one more immigrant. She cannot bring her father back, but she does find an ex-soldier to love, an American named Brad Skinner.
Preparation for the Next Life follows the scuffed paths of Skinner, the traumatized ex-soldier, and Zou Lei, the soldier’s daughter, from far-off China and Afghanistan to what sometimes seems like even farther-off Queens, New York. The sense of place in the novel is so strong, so particular, and at the same time so boundless and indistinguishable from the world around it that Lish leaves you dizzy and disoriented in your own country, in your hometown. He sees the vicissitudes of life in the radical variations of landscape, from mountains to deserts to cracked sidewalks and weedy abandoned lots, not as obvious urban metaphors but as solid and concrete—vast, untamable geographies of life.
The America Zou Lei first encounters is tawdry and grim and relentless, a land of furtive, poorly paid, exhausting jobs. Every detail is depressing, even the names of the small cities where she first finds work: 
She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.
The illegal workers live in a Motel 8. She is given “a shirt with an insignia and a visor, the smell of vaporized grease in the fabric.”
Zou Lei, her hair brown, her nose slightly hooked, her eyes “Siberian,” is different from her roommates at the motel and can speak to them only in halting Cantonese, not in their own dialects. When she asks them to teach her their language, she’s told it’s impossible, there are far too many dialects. Then Lish lists them—People’s Terrace, Peaceful Stream, Placid Lake, Winding South, Cotton Fence, more and more of them, Convergence of Peace, Next-to-the-Zhang-Family Dialect. The names are pretty and exotic to our ears; they seem almost impossibly local. And they suggest all the complexity and richness of each of the women’s lives, of immigrant lives, where we might tend to see simply a Chinese immigrant. In this novel, languages both transcend borders and create them, as do people.
When Zou Lei hears this catalog of dialects, she is not deterred. Undocumented, exploited, isolated, utterly alone with strangers in a Motel 8, she says, “Then tell me how to say heaven is high. She smiled and pointed at the stained ceiling. Heaven is high and the earth is wide.” Zou Lei is, of all the people we meet in this book, the one who most resembles what we would like to think of as an American.
But even with her resolute work ethic, her pioneering spirit and insistent optimism, Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant in post–September 11 America, a place and time that is even less welcoming to immigrants than usual. Picked up by immigration authorities as she exits a bodega, she’s sent to jail with no explanation, no lawyer, no trial. She soon loses track of the days. “You could tell who had been picked up in an immigration sweep. It was obvious who she was. She squatted by herself, as all the migrants did.”

Brad Skinner, the US soldier, was not born in northwestern China, yet he feels himself to be as much an alien in America as Zou Lei. Just discharged from the army after three tours of active duty in Afghanistan, he enters New York City with mortar scars on his back, recurring nightmares, uncontrollable rages, and a duffel bag full of military-prescribed antidepressants, antianxiety medications, and sleeping pills: 

Liquor store, groceria, Iglesias de Dios. From somewhere, there was Spanish music. Taillights shot by him and over a bridge. He crossed beneath the highway, in a great tall vault of dark, the steel being knocked by vehicles going over, and climbed pigeonshit-splattered stairs, coming to rooftop level, billboard level—cash for your car—and then he was looking at Manhattan across the black water, a postcard view with all the lights and just the sheer scale of it, the sky violet with energy.

Lish nurtures and encourages the smallest details until they fan out into unexpected panoramas. After her release from jail, still with no explanation, Zou Lei heads for Chinatown in Queens, “where everybody was illegal just like her.” 
There was too much to see and she noticed small things. She saw a hairstyle, a black mohawk, the brown scalp shaved on the sides, and when she saw his face, she was right, he was from Mexico and now he did deliveries for a man with a jade bracelet who had learned enough Spanish to tell him what to do. She passed ducks on steel hooks behind grease-smoked windows of kitchens where she would ask for work.
Her new home is a tiny plywood partition within a building crammed with other tiny plywood partitions inhabited by other undocumented Chinese, her new job at a fast food restaurant in the food court at the Flushing Mall. “I’m strong, even though I’m female,” she tells the manager. 
I’ve had military training. Take order, shout order, deliver takeout, count the till, dump trash, sweep floor, mop floor, wipe counter, wash dish, bowl, pot, dipper, cleaver, shovel, chopstick, spoon, turn out the fire, shut the light, lock the gate. Every day, work hard, sleep sweet.
Skinner, in contrast, has no thought of getting a job. Living off the pay he got when he left the army, he rents a basement room in a house in Queens in a neighborhood that was once Irish. The owner, Mrs. Murphy, chain-smokes Virginia Slims and is so obese she never leaves the house. Her husband is an Irish immigrant, an abusive drunken union plumber; her grown daughter lives at home, sulking and squabbling with both of them; her son, Jimmy, who is not her husband’s son, is in prison.
Skinner’s loneliness when he arrives in New York is acute. He is so haunted he can no longer see even a basketball game on a bar TV screen the way the rest of us do. “They fled across the court and then they stopped and smelled the air. They never knew who was going to hit them with the ball.” He lives in a different reality, one hazy with prescription drugs, beer, and guilt. Just before coming to New York, he learned that his closest friend, his only friend, died. They were wounded together, side by side: 
When his friend exploded, something had struck Skinner in the back…. He scrambled to his friend, he felt him in the sand, and tried to pull him up…. The sand was filling up with Sconyers’ blood. He was letting him die…. The sand became a sucking, sloshing pit that soaked them both and overflowed with blood…. The blood wet his hands and arms, it got on his weapon, and got in his face and mouth and eyes, and he tasted it, his friend’s blood. And the blood itself had weight and the sand had weight, and they combined as a blood mud that dragged them down.
Lish’s combination of glancing observations and throbbing rhythm is particularly powerful in his visions of war, creating an alarmingly straightforward, staccato blur of bewilderment and pain. This is a writer who hears his words, his sentences, his punctuation, who hears meter. His description of Skinner and Sconyers’s first mission in Afghanistan, minimalist, precise, yet sweeping in its scope and humanity, becomes a terrifying poetry: 
Occasionally, they heard battles being fought and at night they watched the lightning flashes and felt the thudding in the ground. It was hard to sleep. People said I miss my girl. I wanna get some. They manned a checkpoint and shot up a car. Their doc from Opa-locka poured a bag of clotting factor in an Iraqi’s chest. Mom’s head was gone. White-faced, Sconyers ran and got a beanie baby for their daughter. They poured canteen water on doc’s hands and it smoked on the road. Someone took a picture of the front seat.

Skinner survives the mortar attack with serious damage to his back. After months of rehab, he recovers, in pain but intact. His friend Sconyers is a different story. Sconyers lost a leg and half his head. The last Skinner heard from him was an e-mail from a rehab center: 

Skin my friend it been a long time. i wanted to write but had to learn first. This device i use my mouth. u should c me. i seem retarded b/c my mind trapped.

It is a brave and cheerful e-mail, informing Skinner that they will have to put off their trip to New York and talking about plans to go to college. The next news Skinner gets is that Sconyers is dead. He slipped into a coma; his parents have just disconnected the machines keeping him alive. The trip to the city that he and his friend dreamed about is made alone, Skinner “holding to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.”
For both Skinner and Zou Lei fitness is a preoccupation. Constrained in their different ways, they both find freedom in the pursuit of physical health and strength. Controlling their bodies is the only control they have left. Physical exercise, and a trust in the extreme discipline it requires, are what bring the vet and the immigrant together, and what bind them. They first meet when Skinner, wandering through Chinatown in search of a massage parlor, comes upon Zou Lei in a corridor behind the restaurant where she works. On her break, she is, characteristically, doing calisthenics. Much of their time together over the course of the book is spent traversing the boroughs by foot, running or walking, she in her worn cheap sneakers, he in his desert army boots. They travel through neighborhoods and boroughs as if they were rugged unsettled territories, deserts, mountains, steppes.
Some of Lish’s most beautiful and most original writing appears in these passages. He peels away urban clichés other writers would embrace in their search for grit or reality. But Lish’s passages are so resilient and unexpected that he seems to have discovered not just the dirt beneath the clichés, but the rich soil they’ve grown out of. Skinner and Zou Lei navigate weeds and pit bulls and weeping asphalt, delivery men hauling dead hogs on their shoulders, children playing soccer with a can, abandoned buildings and buildings swarming with people. The hustling urban intensity and the intensity of their loneliness have been seamless, surrounding them. As they fall in love, the city seems to change, physically, around them: 
It was a clear day after a rain and the trash was pulped on the street. 
They hiked out of Chinatown until they were far enough away to see the red lacquered Chinese eaves and the fire escapes and then kept going…by the expressway and the autorepairs whose signs were in Chinese. The road took them by a cemetery…. They fell into a rhythm, going for miles, and she lost herself, their hoofs beating the drum of the earth as they marched. 
When they made it to the rise where Jewel Avenue crossed over the fields and they could see in all directions—the old condominium towers, the sheets of water, the rooftops and the distance—they stopped and looked at it all. They were at the center of a wheel. Skinner put his arms around her. 
That’s a view, he said.
The view opens itself up, and their lives seem to open as well. There is possibility. The topography is boundless, the city “uncontained. It covered a massive area and graded out into the world. There was no definite end at the horizon.” The romance of Zou Lei and Skinner does not erase the squalor of their lives. Nor does Lish romanticize that squalor. But they are happy, Skinner determined to drink less, to stop smoking, to heal. For Zou Lei, the fear of jail, of deportation, of money for her next meal, all recede as the horizon expands. Her American soldier will protect her. She will work hard and save money. She swells with American pride and confidence, with the immigrant’s American dream: 
You could do anything—sell toys, oranges, ice in the summer, phone cards so that people could call home. Singapore. Philippines. Yemen. Iraq. Ivory Coast. Salvador. You could give out flyers for all-you-can-eat, compramos d’oro—get a cart and roll it over hill and dale now that he is with you.
Zou Lei experiences a joyous sense of freedom in her feelings for him, a freedom that she identifies as American and that she believes identifies her as an American. The police won’t stop her now, and even if they did, if they “scanned her, they would see an American flag on the scan.”

Skinner and Zou Lei find love and trust in his basement apartment filled with pizza boxes and empty beer cans. They are, Zou Lei says, “an army of their own, a two-person unit,” set to fight the battle of his mental recovery and her immigration status. She sneaks food for him from the restaurant, they go to a shabby gym together, they travel the city around them, and they are hopeful. But even tucked away in the basement apartment, they are not safe from the world.

There are strange, new, heavy footsteps in the Murphys’ kitchen above: Jimmy, after ten years in prison, is home. Jimmy turns out to be a nightmare emerging from a nightmare. Prison was a “war zone.” The exercise that means liberty and control to Skinner and Zou Lei was something very different for Jimmy, the military precision of squats and lunges not about control but being controlled, done in unison like a column of soldiers. “They jogged together under the Indiana sky…controlled from a central module by Midwesterners with deep resonant country voices.” And after a decade away from the real world, Jimmy is as marginalized as the Chinese immigrant and the mentally ravaged vet: 
Gradually, he started talking, his voice so rough and hoarse, it sounded as if his vocal cords were dragging on concrete. Whatever he had to say had nothing to do with ordinary life. It was about the way the rules on the Greyhound to the city were poorly thought out and unfairly applied. He had seen the authorities being made fools of in their bus stations by people selling sex and drugs.
Having learned nothing but violence and dependence in prison, Jimmy moves back in with his family, and the pathos of this hulking man in his boyhood room becomes the pathos of the entire American prison system: 
The posters were rolling off the walls. He shut the door and a poster rolled down, the back of the paper white and empty. Before hiding it, he opened up his prison box and looked inside: letters, cards, a copy of Outlaw Biker, a Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup, Psalms, a shaving mirror, a pair of prison-issue white boxer shorts issued by CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, a Capri Sun juice pack, an old Heavy Metal magazine, a red cowboy bandana.
He cadges money off his mother and is truly offended at the expectation that he get a job. The relationship between him and his mother is presented with fastidious, horrifyingly accurate insight into maternal love and denial. Mrs. Murphy shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders and swigs her beer. Jimmy wasn’t brought up to steal, Jimmy just needs time to adjust, Jimmy didn’t get enough discipline from her husband, Jimmy needs time to find himself.
Jimmy, the red-blooded Irish-American, born in Queens, member of the union, is indeed lost in Queens, lost in America, lost in the world, but unlike Zou Lei and Skinner, he doesn’t seem to know it. He is so unconscious that we are afraid of him. And we are right. Lish has created a devastating, satisfying villain, for we can see what weakened Jimmy, what distorted him, and we still cannot stop ourselves from despising him.

Upstairs, an ugly, dysfunctional family rages. Below in the basement, Skinner is deteriorating. Sleepless, angry, drugged, and resentful of the love he once craved from Zou Lei, his mood swings become worse and worse. Zou Lei’s hours are being cut back at the restaurant, too, given to an American-born high school student. The city again changes for her: taking a run toward the buildings she has always thought of as inspiring mountains, the mountains her mother told stories about, she sees only garbage and oil rags stuck to pavement. “The tall buildings that resembled mountains were simply government projects, silent in the ticking heat. That was all they were.”

Skinner begins to fight with Zou Lei, insulting her, pushing her away, then, always, begging her forgiveness. Back and forth they go, suffering and frightened. When Skinner realizes he can marry Zou Lei and save her from deportation, Zou Lei is ecstatic: 
When she came outside in the purple dusk at quitting time, he was waiting. They ate pizza slices while the streetlights came on, went down past the gas station and walked along the river. 
She was so moved she didn’t talk for nearly a mile…. 
Today I know what is a real American, she said. 
She breathed deep, took in the space, the distant lights across the black water. She could not believe her fortune. How life surprised her.
But the bureaucratic barriers, the legal questions, the full array of government obstacles for someone with no documents, are overwhelming. Both of them begin to sink beneath the weight of governmental failure and fear, beneath the weight of their own failure and fear. Lish is unflinching as Skinner spins out of control. Skinner is violent, selfish, weak. He treats Zou Lei badly, so badly that we understand how little control he has over his behavior and his life. But the tremulous thread that holds them together is still there, and when, in the aftermath of one terrible fight, Skinner holds a gun to his head, Zou Lei is still there, too: 
With the lightest touch, as if she were holding a nightingale in one of her mother’s stories, she placed her hands on his arm and gently guided the weapon down from his head. She had to take his fingers off the handle one by one, lifted the firearm out of his grasp and set it as far away as she could in the corner.
Lish can write of the brutality of battle and prison cells and city streets so well because he understands fragility so well.
Preparation for the Next Life resonates all too clearly in the political climate we live in, have lived in for so many years. The novel consciously unfolds amid the greatest contemporary failures of this country—immigration policy, poverty, racism, prisons, war. The characters breathe those failures; they live in a place where no other atmosphere is available to them. But they also live in Queens in New York City in the United States of America. Lish’s beautiful, mournful novel is animated not just by desperation and failure or by cruelty and malice, but also by the possibility, centuries of possibility, that immigrants have discovered here. For Zou Lei, like so many before her, one of those possibilities is going west, again.
Zou Lei boards a Greyhound bus and winds up in the blazing sun of Arizona, where she eats rice and beans, speaks Spanish more often than she speaks Chinese, suffers slights and indignities in a different accent, a different key. The tragic dignity of her journey continues; there is another desert for her to traverse. She is a nomad, like her ancestors. Above her a hawk flies over roofs and valleys, then lands in the mountains, waiting for her to catch up, as foreign and universal as the bird of her mother’s Uighur folktale, as American and universal as hope in the Dickinson poem. Atticus Lish has written a transcendent novel. - Cathleen Schine

Atticus Lish, Life Is with People. Tyrant Books, 2012.


120 drawings printed on lined composition paper. Cover printed on blue, yellow, brown, and green colored paper.Very few of these were produced. Know that not ordering this book is blowing it with your life. Thank you.

To view drawings and read introduction please visit, the book's mini site here.


Previews at Vice


There was a new release from Tyrant Books yesterday. Life Is with People by Atticus Lish is 120 pages of illustrations and text by Atticus. The covers come in four different colored papers. They are thick and nice. The illustrations and text are printed on composition (lined) paper that is thick and nice. This isn’t something I can really try to sell to you. You either like it, or you do not. You either get it, or you do not. I am not saying one is better than the other. Personally, I see each page as a poem that takes awhile to sink in. I can’t really look at too many of them in one sitting. I once looked at a stack of 300 of them in one sitting and felt mental and ill for ten hours afterward.  These books cost $20 to make, so I am selling them for $20. If we sell all of them, we break even. I’m not being all, “Look how generous I am.” I am being all, “I think this book is so important that I do not want any kind of deterrence from buying it for those who may not be able to afford it.” Book design by the good-eyed Ryan P. Kirby. There were only 500 of these produced. Do not hesitate. Actually, I am so behind this book that if you order one and think it was not worth your money, you can call me and tell me why and if you make one iota of sense, I will reimburse you. Cool? Cool. Thank you kindly. -
GianCarlo DiTrapano

The drawings in this book are mainly ones I drew in frustration and anger over the great events of the world, such as Bush’s attempted restructuring of the Middle East and the line-up of what was on nightly TV. Quite simply, it was a process of ruin. It started off with our watching Tony Danza in “Who’s the Boss?” and, after they took that away, eventually led to our sitting through “McLeod’s Daughters” on HBO Asia. My one consolation—in that it gave me perspective—was that programming was even more deplorable in Baghdad during the same period. An army recruiter in Bay Ridge recently told me that they’re “rebuilding the country” and suggested that I get involved. Thank you, no! My political and historical sophistication, which was painfully acquired, forced me to make this reply immediately, and I marched off swinging my arms. My path since then would lead me inexorably towards fulfilling myself as a neighborhood personality: the guy who wears the same tracksuit bottoms day after day. Meanwhile, the bar code on my Brooklyn Public Library card was getting worn off from all the John Sandford I was borrowing at the Mill Basin Branch. But this is how you learn. You make connections from one part of yourself to another and the whole thing spreads, possibly to others. I met Gian, whose support led me to announce on the A train: “I can become my own John Sandford!” Throughout this process, my wife and I continued our parallel journeys as both acquaintances and roommates. Weekends were taken up with quest romance—as far as Port Jefferson, Long Island—and beyond. One day in June, at sunrise, a Suffolk County cop conducted a field interview with us from the window of her cruiser, saying: “I’m pretty sure I saw you both fifteen miles back up the road by the animal reserve.” Without question, she was correct. “Are you in trouble of some kind?” We smirkingly informed her that we “had never been better.” I added, hubristically, “Where Sontag falls short, Paglia is our guide.” This was also true, though privately, I had begun to feel that in referring to “just a single step from Pre-Raphaelite naturism to Gustave Moreau’s Decadent jeweled artifice,” she was not only committing a gross understatement but also attacking me personally. Nevertheless, life—life involving other people—would go on. One night on Queens Boulevard, I experimented with a civic mindedness that led me to try to shut off a spraying fire hydrant by forcing the cap closed against the jet of water: a physical impossibility! You can’t shut off a hydrant this way. You have to turn the bolt at the top with a wrench, as I learned by staring out my window at a block party, which I would decline to attend. Children have always been a problem for me. I decided to deal with them through cartoons. “Look at your ugliness—you and your loudmouth mothers!” I whispered, my face leaving moist circles on the window. Doing leg raises on the floor, my wife in her bandana asked, “Are you actually crying?” Clearly it was time to refocus. “Give yourself a good slapping, so I don’t have to.” We hiked to the 4C Breadcrumb factory on Pennsylvania Avenue, as much for the simple pleasure of being somewhere new as for any other artistic purpose. For hours, we watched the gulls through the fence surrounding the land reclamation project. “Look at how they spear things with their bills,” Beth said. “You need that. Eyes, muzzle, target. Bang. One shot, one kill.” Still somewhat unsteady but fast regaining my sense of a purpose-drive life, I ventured a smile: “Two in the chest, one in the head...” “Exactly. Or two in the chest, then aim under his vest, shoot him in the pelvis to bring him down, then doubletap the head.” We held hands on the way back, grabassing a little. “Look at the tank on Frank!” somebody whistled outside the Psychiatric Center in Ruggles and, my insouciance fully restored, I turned and bowed. Thus, the enterprise continued. My concern for the suffering of others, briefly stimulated by Sontag, found a new outlet in just keeping the apartment clean. To this end, one of the biggest contributors to my success has been America’s Laundromat whose owner explained to me in a fit of self-expression: “The way I see it, the military is like the sun, and the rest of society is at the beach just enjoying the sun, enjoying its light, warmth, and protection. That’s why I call it ‘America’s Laundromat.’” The fifth wash was free. Rapturously, I pressed my newly laundered tracksuit bottoms to my face. “They smell like Mountain Breeze. I can’t tell you what a first this is for me!” I blurted. After vacuuming the carpet and doing the dishes, I knew I would be ready for, and would welcome, whatever was coming next in this unpredictable but potentially rewarding life. Drawings during this period would reflect my effort, like Swinburne, “to emulate Kleist’s Achilles, whose breasts are gnawed by the Amazon and her dogs” (Sexual Personae, p.465). Not everything would work out. Paglia teaches that all great art comes from sexual conflict: I have been looking for a sexual conflict to be in—and I am still looking. The closest I came was a limo driver who was parked by the train yards in Long Island City who called out to me as I jogged by, “You got a nice body.” That night, I told Beth I thought my diet was working, but beyond this mainly private sense of accomplishment, this episode didn’t spur me on to any great artistic work. With respect to Professor Paglia, the most useful inspiration I got was from an article in the Chinese Journal of Clinical Dermatology on “a case of cutaneous acute zygomycosis by Rhizopus arrhizus after serious drug eruption.” From the unforgettable color photos to the description of the “cotton-candy-like colony” living in the subject’s parotid gland, this was material that I believed I could shape into something evocative—an evocation of myself. This book was not written (drawn) for or against anyone in particular. My outlook is general, medical. It is essentially an inaudible—and less angry—version of my voicemail greeting. Assistance and support from various sources are gratefully acknowledged: first and foremost, from my publisher Gian of Tyrant Books; less so, the Sunset Park Weatherization Program; and only because I have to see them every day, Orian and Sabra Chen at the King Bak Minimart on 7th Avenue.

1. If I close my eyes, I cannot see Atticus Lish’s book, Life Is with People. If I listen to the book with my eyes closed, especially at night, I hear my wall heater. If I toss the book across my room, it usually hits something, makes a sound–after I open my eyes, I feel surprised to find it.
2. If I were blind, I feel like I wouldn’t know what I’d say about Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People. I would probably wonder about the book’s title. I would probably wonder what life is? And what people are? And I would probably try to imagine Atticus Lish, make associations, which might not be possible, with his name. But, I would also probably hold on to his book a little longer, really hold it, rub its corners and flip its pages, and maybe even put the book up to my nose. I would probably know something about dust and fabric.
3. Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People, published by Tyrant Books, does not feel transitory, hazardous, or illegal. It smells new.
4. Even though it is a concrete object produced for consumption and made in a traditional format, Life Is with People feels good when it is included in a stack of books of similar size. However, people fail to fight, argue, debate, or even seem to notice it when it is displayed by itself on the living room table in my apartment. If they do pick it up, they also put it down. But, I never hear them talk about it. Certain books silence people, I guess.
5. I don’t use my books as coasters. Even books I don’t care for anymore. I put books I don’t care for anymore on the street, but only after making a few phone calls to see if certain friends want them.
6. I wonder what Life Is with People would become, if it weren’t connected to images? If it set out to draw what it saw–and what it desired–without the use of lines, shadings, erasures and writing, but instead with the use of something else? Something really hard to imagine? I guess if I were blind, I would try to imagine a book that looked like what I could imagine: black, maybe.
7. One of the tenets of a certain kind of conceptualism is a distrust of optical experience as a basis for art. The more a drawing–or a series of drawings seemingly randomly organized but thematically related, as is the case of Life Is with People–relies on visual sensation, the lower its cognitive value. I enjoy what my friends tell me when I ask them to describe or read to me what’s inside Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People.
8. When I close my eyes, I am not haunted by Life Is with People. But, I imagine things associated with it: its weight, its scent, the sounds it makes when I turn its pages or drop it on the floor. Life Is with People doesn’t seem to be a ghost. But, you never know.
9. I make wishes about it. I want to be cut by its paper. I want to be hit across the face with its thickness and given a bloody nose that I can taste. I want to hear it break a window or be used to beat a cat to death. I want somebody to open it in the next room and scream. Or laugh. And keep on laughing until I start to laugh. Then when we realize we are both laughing, stop–and get really quiet.
10. I feel like the nature of an object is that it has no nature. Art seems to support that. I guess I wish I knew how the actual, physical book, Life Is with People, were made? Where did its paper come from? Which machines and people assembled it? How was it designed? Which programs were used? Where did the drawings come from and how did they get into the book Tyrant Books published? What were the ideas informing it? I try to imagine all the forces of history coming together to make this book–again and again, but microscopically different each time–just as all the forces of history come together each moment I breathe. Sometimes, when I face a window and close my eyes, I almost experience sex.
11. I wonder what the function is of the drawings in Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People? Of course, I feel like there are probably more than one. But, maybe, sometimes at different times–and for different people at different times–there’s only very temporarily one? I wonder if, provisionally, one of the functions of Life Is with People is the radical critique of institutions of art? Almost everyday I make art with my eyes closed that consists of nothing other than my ideas of it: meaningless, paradoxical, black, maybe.
12. Maybe one of the functions of Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People is traveling through space? As a way of making the visible invisible? Minimizing the distance–when I close my eyes tightly and make a wish–between the extraordinary, widening gap between me and the characters I’m told his drawings represent? Traveling. I’m doing that right now. Simply by closing my eyes. And listening. Life Is with People is such a quiet book that when I close my eyes and just listen to it: I hear the sounds of cars and trucks and buses humming outside my bedroom window.
13. Life Is with People is art because I say so.
14. I put a wig on Atticus Lish’s book Life Is with People. I circled its cover with red lipstick and perfumed its pages. I asked my girlfriend, Alexandra, to walk me to Booksmith on Haight. After we entered the book store, I asked Alexandra to take me to the poetry section. With her help, I placed the book on the top shelf. She laughed and said, “Okay.” I said, “Okay, now let’s go.” She said, “Okay.” And laughed. We hurried out of there. “How did it look?” “Like a fucked up Barbie. Like a stupid, fucked up Barbie.” “Sweet.” - Janey Smith

Life Is with People by Atticus Lish is a collection of black and white captioned drawings unconnected by plot and printed on lined notebook paper. These drawings sear across a spectrum of black humor—from the repulsively crude and the delightfully clever to the delightfully crude and the repulsively clever. Depending on the taste and constitution of the reader, Life Is with People may or may not induce a maniacal cycle of laughter, grimaces, and grimace-laughter. This book has guts. On every page it slits and spills them.
At literary blog HTMLIGANT, Tyrant Books editor Giancarlo DiTrapano says of Life Is with People: This isn’t something I can really try to sell to you. You either like it, or you do not. You either get it, or you do not. I am not saying one is better than the other. Personally, I see each page as a poem that takes awhile to sink in. I can’t really look at too many of them in one sitting. I once looked at a stack of 300 of them in one sitting and felt mental and ill for ten hours afterward.
The cover foretells the content: behind the wheel of a parked car sits a screaming driver, his hands clutching the back of his head, his face spattered in blood. Outside the car stand three men. The first, closest to the driver, casually raises a knife. The second, beside the first, watches, his expression somewhere between boredom and menace. The third stands a short distance behind the car and captures this event on a camcorder strapped to his hand. These three assailants are distinct in ordinary ways—they look like everyday folk, their faces mundanely unique. Only the driver howls from a horrifying place of pain, anger, and madness.
This collision—of the common and the fiendish—provides the book’s panicked heartbeat.
In his introduction, Lish notes, “It will be obvious that the book is mainly drawn from life, though there is an element of wish-fulfillment—not everything you see is real. Some material is imagined.”
Here the reader will find hairy hands and necks and faces, sneers and screams and cries for help, sex and murder and self-mutilation. Hoary naked crones address Tony Danza. An enthusiastic man is willfully shat upon by a suspended woman. A mother berates a father for not playing Nintendo with their son. A passerby is mocked by a pack of wretched boys. A damaged man with a beer and a bucket declares that he can direct better movies than Guy Richie.
A strange thing might happen: the reader may begin to regard the more “ordinary” images as actually more disturbing than those that are “conventionally disturbing.” After all, aren’t these mundane events more likely to be happening, right now, somewhere in our world?
An even stranger thing might happen: the reader may begin to regard the conventionally disturbing drawings as no less mundane than those that are more ordinary. After all, aren’t these disturbing events just as likely to be happening, right now, somewhere in our world?
A still stranger thing: the possibility that Lish’s introduction, which comes across as tongue-in-cheek, may in fact be profoundly sincere.

To say it another way: Lish’s world is our world. That he slowly shocks the reader into this realization is no small feat.                                                                           *
A brutishly-built shouting man is assaulted—one man holds his arms while another gamely stabs his chest. The caption reads, “Around the world, Christmas is celebrated by different people in different ways.”                                                                               *
Some of Lish’s captions endow the drawings with new dimensions, some underscore dimensions already present, and many provide humor—sometimes with severe understatement (“Chances are he would never be the same again”), and sometimes with shifts in register (“It thrilled Julian to think that, years from now, after he and the beautiful stranger were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, they would look back and smile remembering the night they met behind the Autozone”). In every case, the captions and drawings converse.

“I am a romantic,” says Lish in his introduction. “My primary goal in producing this book is to meet people with similar interests.”
I handed Life Is with People to my friend JG. He grimaced and did not laugh. He said, “This can get published?”
“This guy can’t even draw,” he said, handing it back.
I handed Life Is with People to my brother. He laughed, grimaced, and grimace-laughed. He pointed to intricate shading on a furious knot of intestinal tentacles blasting out of a man’s rear. “This guy can really draw,” he said.
I handed Life Is with People to my friend MM, who’s adept at telling jokes that are as spectacularly clever as they are offensive. He laughed, then laughed harder, then laughed hard at how hard he was laughing. He said, “I wonder if he does the pictures drunk and the captions sober.”
“This is—wow,” he said more than once, laughing, flipping through it.
He pointed to a drawing of a man chopping off his own hand with a cleaver. The caption reads, “It’s just how I feel at the moment.”
He said, “This belongs above a desk. At work.” 
                                                                           *
One of the only recurring characters is a daring man with a feather in his cap. Near the end he delivers a monologue that, to me, captures Lish’s goals as an artist:

Today, we’re making popovers. As you can see, I’m using cake flour, not the baking flour used by ordinary people. This is what science involves—a departure from ordinary grains and powders. A rebellious swerve. When I powder my feet, that’s when I use the baking flour—see? Not before. My jacket is covered in more butter than the tray with the popovers on it. That’s why it shines like this. I could go on. It’s about repelling water as well as conventional thinking. Everything is dual-use. The popovers contain a high-explosive core. You don’t get this on the normal cooking shows. You want to know about the feather? Don’t ask! The feather is so I can be identified by friendly forces. The kicker is: there are no friendly forces. I’m alone out here, unfettered. That’s the paradox of a feather. Let me [go] back to baking. So this is what we do: whisk-whisk-whisk, we knead, press, form, form the popover, it goes on the tray—this is all familiar. What’s unfamiliar is—[when] it’s time to bake, you slide yourself into the oven with the tray. That’s what no one expects.

DiTrapano argues that you either get this book or you don’t. I’d like to make a case for a reader getting that he or she won’t always get it, that such a state is desirable, not to mention difficult for an artist to evoke. In Life Is with People, the expectation is that Lish will reach with word and image for “what no one expects”—before, after, or during the detonation. - JOSEPH SCAPELLATO


Atticus Lish’s “Life Is With People”: A Discussion
You might not expect a book abounding with illustrations of grotesque, sometimes terrifying, figures to open with a warm personal statement explaining the artist’s search for friendship. And yet that’s how Atticus Lish’s Life Is With People begins — which in turn provided Vol.1 Brooklyn editors Jason Diamond and Tobias Carroll a fine starting point for their own discussion of Lish’s book, just released by Tyrant Books.
Tobias Carroll: So, in getting this discussion of Life Is With People off the ground, I figured I’d start with the book’s opening — specifically, Lish’s introduction, which an anachronistic figure hovers above bearing pen and ink. He writes, “My primary goal in producing this book is to meet people with similar interests.” It’s a warm, even idealistic statement — and then that cheeriness is dispelled entirely by the grotesques that populate Lish’s work. (I’m not sure of exactly how I’d characterize it: drawings? Cartoons?) I was curious to learn what you made of the introduction, and where you think that Lish’s work can be categorized. I remember you mentioning Raymond Pettibon, who I agree makes for a good point of reference. Then work of the late John Callahan also comes to mind; in some of the pieces here, Lish shares Callahan’s fondness for a punchline with a raised middle finger behind it. If you had to file Life Is With People, where would you end up placing it?
Jason Diamond: I found the introduction so interesting as well as necessary to looking at the entire collection. Lish mentions that his work is the product of a romantic inspiration and that it’s a bildungsroman.  When something is sold to me as a coming-of-age story, which Lish says the book is (along with a cautionary tale), I mentally begin to reference the old standbys: Great Expectations, Duddy, Catcher, etc.  That setup really made me look at the illustrations in a different way than I may have if he hadn’t included an introduction.  I did mention Pettibon, but flipping through the pages again, I see some Shel Silverstein and something that brings to mind the Scary Stories You Tell in the Dark books.
TC: And now that you bring that up, I’m going to have to look back through the book with a different focus. Viewed within the context of a coming-of-age narrative, certain things take on a new significance: the constant state of menace that certain characters undergo throughout; the grotesque authority figures that populate the book; and even the somewhat irreverent take on Judaism — I’m thinking specifically of the scene of the Almighty washing his hands “just like it says in the Torah.”
Also: you’re spot-on with the Scary Stories reference. Much like those, some of those images are going to be lodged into my subconscious for years to come, occasionally popping up to give me the shivers as I try to fall asleep.
Where do you think some of Lish’s other fixations come from? I’m thinking of the specificity with which he cites certain things: “International Flavors Coffee” in one bit, or the guy brandishing a gun who hates “HBO’s Deadwood.”
JD: It’s an interesting question, and I really couldn’t tell you.  Maybe they aren’t fixations, but possibly composites of people and situations?
Something I liked was the randomness of the captions.  They made me think of the British electro group Underworld.  A friend in high school told me that the lyrics to the music came from snippets of things one of the guys heard while riding on the busses in London, which is sort of funny of you think about it.  You have a song like “Born Slippy,” that is essentially the theme song for doing heroin in the 1990s (thanks to Trainspotting) and the lyrics really don’t mean anything at all. I was wondering to myself if maybe Lish took a similar approach — not necessarily by making his drawing or words lack meaning, but by taking things he saw, heard and felt and turning them into the pictures that only he truly understands the deeper meanings to.
Did you notice any sort of theme to the drawings?
TC: I saw certain grotesque figures pop up again and again — musclebound men, terrifyingly emaciated women. And there are also variations on the theme of couples whose relationship is decaying — of horrible arguments rendered in a capsule. I was reminded, at times, of Nick Antosca’s recent novella The Obese — both it and Lish’s book seemed to me to possess a sort of scorched-earth satire, where everyone involved is somehow monstrous…
JD: Did any of the images make you uncomfortable at all?  Any specific reactions in general?
TC: A lot of the images left me with some discomfort: the aging naked women, for one, which seemed to be (for me) the closest Lish’s images came to a familiar caricature. But there are also figures where the grotesque aspects give way to outright horror — a figure lurking behind a door seeking food, for one. There’s something very tactile about these drawings, and I think that lends them a skin-crawling quality that some of the same basic forms might not have had they been rendered differently.
What about you? And — do you think Lish’s aim here is more satirical, or more provocation?
JD: I thought provocation the first time, but then I looked it over again and realized that wasn’t at all the case.  I imagined that it’s instinctual to feel that way with drawings like Lish’s.  At first they pop out and seem to work on a totally visceral level, but then you find yourself going back to look at them again and again, searching for meaning.  I think that’s the sign of a great piece of art, and that’s what Lish has created.
TC: As I tried to put together my closing thoughts on Life Is With People, I found myself looking back at a number of the pieces in the book, and agreeing with you. There is, I think, more meaning to Lish’s work than just the punchlines that (admittedly) do appear on more than a few of them. I do think that it’s significant that, for all that some of the moments in here do horrify, Lish ends with a pair of (more or less) domestic scenes, and uses a punchline to bring the whole thing to a close. Looking at the book’s title sitting across my desk from me, I also find myself thinking about that, and how so few of the drawings involve solitary characters. (Even when a character is alone on the page, they’re often addressing someone else.) It’s an odd sort of socialization that Lish is describing here — and oftentimes, it’s far from peaceful — but sometimes there’s a comfort there. Maybe, like the last words of the collection, we should “be happy with that.”
JD: He seems like an interesting guy. I think at the end of the day when you can come away thinking that, you’ve experienced something worthwhile. - www.vol1brooklyn.com/2012/05/31/atticus-lishs-life-is-with-people-a-discussion/

Released in early 2012 from Tyrant Books–the brainchild that brought us Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg, Eugene Marten’s Firework, and Michael Kimball’s Us–Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People is a sketchbook drawn through a poetic gloryhole. It is a violent, raging, and brutal book, yet also houses subtle moments of massive and quiet weight. But what is Life Is with People? In a recent posting on Vice, Tyrant kingpin Giancarlo DiTrapano described it this way:
“I met Atticus last year and I got all beggy with him about whether he wrote or not and if I could get a story from him for the next Tyrant. He said he couldn’t find any of his stories (heard that one before), but he’d been messing around with some drawings if I wanted to see those. We don’t really do “art” in the Tyrant but I still wanted to see what he’d done. You know when you find some obscure and unknown shit and you think you’re the only one who knows about it and that it somehow gives you powers? That’s what the package Atticus dropped off for me did. These drawings have the right ingredients. There is the perfect ratio of humor and disease, transcendence and decadence, laughablilty and pain.”
Life Is with People looks like a notebook (complete with ruled aqua lines and the texture of forgotten notes) and is filled with a collection of seemingly amateurish art that is exactly as Gian describes it: obscure and slightly unknowable but full of beautiful powers. Atticus Lish, son of the well-known and all-powerful Gordon Lish, has indeed mixed all of the right ingredients into these panels, each page a new arm in a freaky and bright beast both ghastly violent and oddly satisfying.
The drawings are in part crudely made–think Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head–and part ornately and gorgeously outlined, akin to contemporary artist Scott Teplin, but Life Is with People is more than just art. What makes the drawings in this book come to life (spring, pour, bleed), is the unpaneled dialogue and header / footer captions that accompany each piece.
For example:

This is not the world’s greatest art, but the dialogue is a perfect semblance of the draining of life we all experience, of the ability to finally and with gusto relate that we are only modestly fulfilled, and that we no longer expect more than that.
Or this one,
where the crude nature of the art itself, the intentionally ragged and monstrous character, mixes with the earnestness of the dialogue, off-setting the simplistically genuine (“Your English Breakfast tea is ready”) with the grit and stank and its atmosphere.
This is what Life Is with People does. It creates a space where acts of mid-violence (stabbing, hacking, bleeding) are juxtaposed with careful still-life moments of cooking or sexual passion. In this book, the easy moments in life are rendered in blighted art, and within each juxtaposition is a kind of new poetic art.
In one of the longer captions, Atticus Lish writes:
“Today, we’re making popovers. As you can see, I’m using cake flour, not the baking flour used by ordinary people. This is what science involves – a departure from ordinary grains and powders. A rebellious swerve.”
Lish’s Life Is with People is exactly that: a rebellious swerve, art and words that come at you from one direction and leave from another, all the while tricking and braying and joking, but never quite letting us settle in. It’s a work that begs us to the edge and then holds us there, just shy of falling.
But in case I haven’t made sense of it above, clarified what Tyrant Books sees in Life Is with People and what I see in it too–a great and unexpected work of art–then here is a cataloging of the first 30 imagistic moments contained in Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People, listed until we ran out of words:
self ass-pounding
audience and head-severing
pre-death
parental hammering
head-butchers
feet-licking
Bernie Madoff as a pet
an egotistical toast
giving up a daughter
protecting children
a screaming child
a depressed Asian child
white-trash parents
an Easter egg competition
a split head
feeding
a person as horse
eyes stabbed out
a fat graduate
bullying
a new handshake
shit cupcakes
bunny drawings
Macedonian jumping-splits
a lizard woman
a sexual bear
a girl fight
tv and religion
eager men
human honey -   J. A. Tyler

  
Atticus Lish by Jesse Barron

Hardship, the borough of Queens, and new American pilgrims.

Photo courtesy of Atticus Lish.

It’s been a while since we had a great novel about being poor in New York where poor did not mean broke. The difference between the two conditions may be how reasonably you can hope they’ll change, and Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is a book about people hoping to change their lives in a city that will not let them.
Preparation is a violent and unfashionable book. Unfashionable in that it's not concerned overtly with consciousness, subjectivity, voice, politics, or making art, but instead with money and the law as the impersonal determinants of fate. Lish knows—or just as validly, conveys he knows—the institutions that are often least visible in American fiction, like prison, and the parallel economy of the undocumented. To find a predecessor for this kind of cross-sectional social novel, where the lawyer’s office is as vivid as the basement squat, you may have to go back to ‘90s DeLillo or ‘70s Robert Stone.
Lish has lived in New York off and on since the ‘90s, and this shows. The street corners, masājid, massage parlors, and basement food courts of Queens have the clarity and thickness you get by walking and hanging out, and listening greedily to thousands of hours of talk. In the first sentence, a woman who’s been hitchhiking carries “shower shoes” for the truck stops, not sandals. Her name is Zou Lei, and she comes to the city without papers after the death of her parents in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. While working at a food court, she meets and falls in love with Skinner, an Iraq veteran looking for a reason not to die. Their desire to get married makes for a desperate plot—it’s almost impossible to be legalized by marriage if one doesn’t have ID to begin with.
Reading the novel this fall, I tried to figure out how Lish had made such a far-fetched love story credible and moving. Then I realized I was trying to figure out the wrong thing. This love story isn’t far-fetched. The question was why I’d never seen it done before.
Jesse Barron Both of your characters arrive in New York without money or connections—with nothing, basically. What did you do when you first got here?
Atticus Lish I had just come back from China, where my wife Beth and I were teaching English, and we weren’t really sure what to do with ourselves. We kicked around the idea of moving to New York, and I thought, Okay, let’s do that. I came ahead, and she stayed in Arizona with her mom and dad. I had our earnings from China, totaling about a thousand dollars. I spent one of my first nights in a McDonald’s, and I used that for my main character, Skinner.
Then I went on Craigslist and found a landlord. I didn’t have a cell phone, which made it more complicated. I talked him out of a security deposit, saying, “You’ll just have to trust me.” This was in the Newkirk neighborhood of Brooklyn. Then I got my hustle on, and I ran door to door, saying, ”Hey, I need a job.“
JB That seems anachronistic for New York.
AL Well, by talking to people on the street and on the subway, I found a woman who worked at a temping company, and she gave me a chance. But I didn’t start writing until about a year and a half down the road.
JB Had you been writing before?
AL I did try to write when I was a kid. I don’t know why I stopped. It seemed like I had to figure out life first. I guess life took me about twenty years.
My wife Beth and I have always been nomads. When I got out of the Marine Corps in ’96, we spent a short time in Boston, then lit out for Los Angeles. And we didn’t know anyone out there either. But I should tell you I made a very conscious decision not to make this book about me.
JB Why?
AL I wouldn’t be interested to read a book about me. I’m a well-fed, college-educated, privileged guy who works quite comfortably at a computer all day. My big drama is taking a trip to the refrigerator for more cheese.
JB But some of your experience in China obviously made it into the book. Zou Lei, your heroine—she’s Uighur, from the far west. I think you must have had an intense reaction to that part of the country.
AL Very much so.
JB Was that the first time you’d been?
AL Yes sir. I’d been in the country previously, in 1988, the year before Tiananmen. And China had changed a lot during the intervening period, not necessarily for the better.
But the far west, Xinjiang Province, was thrilling. In the Taklamakan Desert I experienced silence, peace, joy, and energy. The only other time I’ve had that has been in an Italian cathedral. It was mystical. I can understand why—here’s a quote for you—John Walker Lindh would have been drawn to the Taliban. I imagine the landscape itself could have won him over.
JB From the outside, it seems like you were trying to distance yourself from some other New York novels, which are often Brooklyn or Manhattan-based. Queens is less visible.
AL Well, I didn’t have to look for that distance consciously because the loop you’re describing, I was not in it. In the early ‘90s, I used to live in the east Flushing area of Queens. I lived in Corona, too. I was fascinated with the unfashionable parts of New York. Beth and I used to take these long walks. We walked all the walks that are in that book. When the main character walks from Jamaica all the way up to Northern Boulevard—I did that. I walked from Connecticut with Beth all the way back to Grand Central.
JB How long did that take?
AL Twenty-four hours. We did it because—I don’t know why we did it, actually. It’s very strange. We did it because I was in love with the city.
JB Walking is a big thing in the book. So is running—running alone, being chased. And going to the gym. With Zou Lei especially, she’s in a situation where your body’s what you have. You need to be able to throw a punch. And you need to be able to run away.
AL I wanted the book to have action, but I didn’t want the action to be contrived, to be imposed on characters who, in real life, would not find themselves in extremity or be prepared to fight. I think it’s a syndrome with movies today—the rest of the world is soaked in violence, but American movies have to draw in the occult or sci-fi. Meanwhile, all the stuff they’re describing is happening to real people ten blocks from the theater.
And here I had a female character, and I didn’t want her to be girly. You know, I met these two Tibetan women when I was in Shanghai. They were both wearing black cowboy hats and had sheath knives. I went over the to two of them and said that we’d like to take a picture. Sort of on instinct, I went to put my arm around one of them. I didn’t mean anything by it. The woman I began to embrace reacted—and just the way she tensed up, without even having to raise a hand, I was really interested in that.
JB She had a physical presence.
AL She was a tough lady. And I was thinking of someone like that for Zou Lei.
JB The idea of self-reliance. That’s an American idea in some ways. It’s old-fashioned in some ways.
AL I was thinking of that. These are the new American pilgrims, the new pioneers, people like Zou Lei. People who are Asian or perhaps from Latin America, who are coming here with nothing.
JB It’s a settlement-of-the-West story, but it’s in New York.
AL I thought of it as a real American story, yes.
JB It would be convenient for this interview if Skinner had a cowboy element too, but he doesn’t really. He’s not a settler like Zou Lei. He has an ID card and money from the VA.
AL The reason this book has a Skinner in it, is that I became obsessed with the war, and especially in the criminal aspect of war. I was interested in the way war opens the gateway to atrocities. I also saw war as a contaminating force in many very literal ways. In Iraq, the sewage system was nonexistent; there is shit everywhere. It stinks. War is this spillage of disease. People get unusual illnesses.
Then you have camp morality: where there’s a military camp there’s going to be whorehouses. People are bringing that home with them.
JB You would have been in the Marine Corps when there wasn’t a war on.
AL I was between the Gulf War and Iraq. I don’t consider myself Joe Marine or anything. I don’t have personal experience of combat.
JB How did you get confident enough to write about a guy who’d been traumatized by combat?
AL I put him together—there were images I picked up. Who’s the guy who was in the remake of the Mechanic? Ben Foster. He was in a movie with—I think it’s called The Messenger, with Woody Harrelson.
JB They’re doing death notification.
AL Right. I saw Ben Foster with that black hood over his head and the way he was constantly going to work out. I did my best to try to assemble an organized picture of the impact of war on people who are damaged by it. I read soldiers’ testimonies. One thing I learned is that, out of a group of people who are exposed to the same thing, different ones will react different ways. After an IED goes off, you might see one guy laughing, one guy throwing up, one guy crying.
JB In New York, Skinner doesn’t carry himself like a soldier. He’s not one of those guys who leave Penn Station with their uniform on, and it’s pressed. Skinner is wearing a sweatshirt.
AL I didn’t think of Skinner as a natural soldier. There are some guys who really talk army, and some guys who never shed the street. They never shed the block. They get out of boot camp, and they revert. They go right back to smoking. You might be taught to refer to a weapon as a weapon; they call it my gun, my gat, my strap. I saw Generation Kill, and there’s a moment where one of the recon marines says, “I feel funny if I’m not carrying my strap.” The word strap. It stuck in my head. Skinner’s gonna be the type of guy who talks like, I’m pimpin, I’m carryin my strap.
JB You have another character, Jimmy, who’s kind of this petty criminal, really violent. Evil, actually. He appears toward the middle of the book, when he’s finishing a sentence at Rikers. Where did the details come from for the prison section? 
AL From the time I was young, if there was a documentary on TV about prison, I would watch it. There’s a line in the book where Jimmy says, “I don’t care about your sad brown eyes.” Around 1990, I saw somebody interviewed from prison; they stuck a microphone in his face while he was working out. And he said, “If you’re some new guy in here, I don’t care what happens to you. I don’t care about your sad brown eyes.”
JB Did you visit Rikers?
AL I visited the Manhattan Detention Center when I was arrested years ago—that’s how I visited that. The jail scene with Zou Lei in Bridgeport, that’s taken from my personal experience. I was locked up for a couple of days in North Carolina. The interior, the way it smells like animals.
JB That “sad brown eyes” line waited more than fifteen years before you used it. Do you import a lot of dialog from the street and from TV?
AL I do overheards. Some of the dialog in the book comes from people who didn’t know I was listening to them.
JB I once heard Richard Price talk, and he said he would always sit out on his stoop and listen to people. And so one day he’s sitting there, and two guys are walking down the street, and one says, “I’m not saying it’s okay to hit a woman …” And that’s all, he’s gone.
AL The other day I heard somebody say, on the street, “I have a baby inside me. I’m gonna go to jail.” They actually said that. I set out to make the book as realistic as possible. I like grittiness, as a consumer of art. You know what I’m a big fan of? You know Nicolas Winding Refn?
JB I just watched all three of Refn’s Pusher movies in a row. There’s a similar feeling. The mood, the texture, and the talk. It’s both time killing and incredibly threatening.
AL You know, I didn’t even know who he was. Beth knew. She’s got her ear to the ground a little bit better than I have. She was looking out for me.
JB Refn’s work seems messy at first, and only at the end do you realize how tight the vise has been the whole time. Did you know your ending in advance?
AL Except for the epilogue. The epilogue of this book was Beth’s—and it is an absolutely vital element of the story that I didn’t see on my own. I can never thank her enough for this. Where I initially stopped was the line right before the epilogue, and that pretty much just occurred to me, just one of those things. That was why I wrote the book, to lead up to that line.
JB And she thought it was too unrelenting?
AL She and I had a talk about it, and she said it was a little dark.
JB It is a little dark.
AL Right? And of course, my first reaction was: I don’t care if anybody hates it or not. But if you read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, at the end of even that book, there’s a little glimmer of hope.
JB The fish?
AL The fish. And I thought, she’s right. I need some fish. - bombmagazine.org/article/2000023/atticus-lish