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Atticus Lish (born ?, age 43 ) is an American novelist. His debut, Preparation for the Next Life (New York: Tyrant, 2014), caught its independent publisher “off guard” by becoming a runaway success, winning the Plimpton Prize 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, an undocumented Uighur immigrant, and Skinner, a Pennsylvania-born veteran of the Iraq war. While struggling to survive in New York’s underground economy, Zou Lei meets Brad 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”.

Personal and family life
Like his father, the younger Lish attended Phillips Academy, where he studied Mandarin. Lish describes his childhood as one of “huge privilege”. His father's colleague, the novelist Don DeLillo, used a verbatim prose passage by the nine-year-old Atticus in his novel The Names, with an acknowledgement: "A printed shout from the housetops goes as well to Atticus Lish, in fond appreciation". Lish dropped out of Harvard University after two years. He then worked several unglamorous jobs, including Papaya King and a foam factory in Gardena, California. Lish joined the US Marine Corps, but was honorably discharged one and a half years into a four-year enlistment. Lish married his wife, Beth, a Korean-born schoolteacher, in 1995. In his mid-30s, Lish returned to Harvard and graduated with a thesis on Ascoli's theorem. During his second matriculation, Lish took a fiction course that inspired him to focus on writing. In 2005, Lish and his wife spent a year teaching English in China; a visit to the remote northwest of the country became the inspiration for his Uighur protagonist.(Williams) He began work on Preparation for the Life to Come in 2008, and spent five years writing the book in longhand.

Of his relationship with his influential father, Lish has said: "When I was writing this book, I was completely isolated from family, from any of the significance my name might have had...It was me and my wife, living together, isolated from almost everybody." 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, and is negotiating the sale of film rights.

A fluent Mandarin speaker, Lish was working as a technical translator at the time of his novel’s publication. In November 2014, he told the Times he’d begun work on another novel. The Wall Street Journal reports the novel is set in Boston.

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. He owns a 1-1-0 record in professional M.M.A. bouts.

List of works

 * Life is With People (New York: Tyrant Books) A difficult-to-classify work Lish describes as “a bildungsroman” and “a cautionary tale whose point is clear” (Tyrant website), with illustrations by the author.
 * Preparation for the Next Life (New York: Tyrant Books, 2014)