Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight

Author: Mitch Sisskind

Publisher: The Song Cave (2017)

Admired by Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, Mitch Sisskind is a professional satirist whose stories and poems can finally be read in one new volume. Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight, a selection from the last five decades, includes an introduction from poet Amy Gerstler, who calls Sisskind “a postmodern master of the anti-epiphany,” and an afterword by David Lehman. Bestowed with outlandish names, Sisskind’s characters make up a cast of failures for whom grace is absent. The hilarity and sadness of many of their surprising situations have the ability to startle readers until, as in his imagined filmography of Tokyo Liscomb, “all hell breaks loose.” The divine is often called upon and sometimes shows up but never in expected ways, since Sisskind, gifted with originality, unsettles all we thought we knew about this world and the next.