\u003cdiv\u003eArguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, \u003cI\u003ePeru\u003c/I\u003e begins with its narrator announcing, \"There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it.\" Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secretâreal or imaginedâunfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn't).\u003cI\u003e Peru\u003c/I\u003e's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that spawned a killing: the sense of tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh. Ambiguous, complex, inventive, and subversively comic, \u003cI\u003ePeru\u003c/I\u003e is a compendium of unnerving observations about memory, violence, obsession, and the potential horror behind the facade of an ordinary life.\u003c/div\u003e
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