Atticus Lish. Photo: Shelton Walsmith

Our current issue features Atticus Lish’s story “Jimmy,” an excerpt from his new novel, Preparation for the Next Life. The novel is out this week, and we’re elated to report that it’s just received a rave review from Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

This is an intense book with a low, flyspecked center of gravity. It’s about blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food, bad options. At its knotty core, amazingly, is perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade … Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories.

Many congratulations to Atticus on the well-deserved praise. Read a brief excerpt from “Jimmy” here, and pick up a copy of Preparation for the Next Life here.