Corner Kicker — Gordon Lish

Years ago, Gordon Lish, editor at Esquire and at the house of Knopf and the revisionist who changed the work of Raymond Carver, published the book Peru, a shocker in which Lish tells of his having killed a child in a neighbor's sandbox. The setting is the NYC suburban Jewish enclave known as the Five Towns, especially the villages of Woodmere, Cedarhurst, and Lawrence. Now he's being blackmailed for the unprosecuted crime, a death by toy hoe. But Lish's wife Penelope, a forbidding figure fifty-seven years his junior with hush-hush ties to the government, steps in and makes After Peru the strangest event in a world-famous career.