There's a new issue of New York Tyrant (Vol. 3 No. 1 I imagine) heading our way soon, but a quick dip back into Vol. 2 no. 2 has a story by Gordon Lish, the famed 70's fiction editor at Esquire, and Knopf editor extraordinaire in the late 80's (where he published, among others, EWN/Dzanc favorites Yannick Murphy, Brian Evenson and Dawn Raffel, to note just a fine few).
The story, "Facts of Steel," is a short one, just over a page in 
length. There is absolutely a rhythm to Lish's writing here - with the story being this short, I probably read it between five and ten times throughout the day and noticed myself honing it to a specific manner of reading by the last couple of times, finding patterns of words to burst out between pauses.
And I love how Lish starts it off:
"Nothing would please me more than for me as an artist to be free to sit here and tell you the truth." He sets himself up immediately as a completely unreliable narrator. I'd love to give you what you want, hell, what I want to give you, but I can't. It set me on edge immediately, questioning every sentence after that the first few times I read it. I still do actually, yet have had a hard time stopping myself from going back just one more time. In fact, I think I'm going to go read it again.
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