Paul Lisicky
“Desire is something that can go out of control. I’ve always been really curious about that pivot, that edge, that thin line between the thing that makes us alive and the thing that just could take us asunder.”
“A vibrant, heart-bursting love letter to queer haven Provincetown, Massachusetts.... But the terrain Lisicky also covers here is that of the human heart freed, momentarily, from terror.”
“Brutally honest... A candid, scorching memoir that emits tenderness and sweet sorrow.”
“A lyrical book of nonfiction both metaphysical and embodied, Later concerns itself contemplatively with the souls of humans and their mortal containers. . . . Lisicky writes lucidly with sorrow and joy of the complicated tension between transience and community in Provincetown.”
“The most moving account of love among artists I’ve ever read. The Narrow Door is astonishing.”
“It’s Lisicky’s radical honesty about all this—life and death, friendship and lost love, ambition and failure—that makes this book so special and at times so unsettling.”
“Paul Lisicky always has the capacity to break your heart for he has the diviner’s gift for finding the wellsprings of the quietest sorrows.”
“A vigorous, interior-driven narrative. . . . Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention.”
“[Famous Builder] reads as if it’s been rinsed in light.”
Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books, including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020), one of NPR's Best Books of 2020, The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press, 2016), a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award, Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012), a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award, The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011), Famous Builder (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Lawnboy (Turtle Point Press, 1999, reissued by Graywolf Press, 2006). A new memoir, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with Joni Mitchell, is forthcoming from HarperOne in February 2025. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library.
In an interview with The Believer, Lisicky was asked about the role of sound in his work. “I’m not really happy until a sentence has a certain cadence,” he responded. “That might involve repetition or some constellation of words that resembles in my mind a line from a song. Once I feel like there’s some connection between that sound and whatever’s going on in my inner life, then that feeds another line, and another line. I often read my work aloud in a mumbling way as I’m writing it. I want to hear it in my voice box. I want it to sound unbidden. I certainly want it to have sense and meaning, but I also want another life for it, not just simply to make shapes in the air. It’s the pleasure of words against one another, which is why we love music—it transcends some kind of armor or stricture.”
He has taught in the creative writing programs at Antioch University Los Angeles, Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently a Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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