Download or read book Mulligan Stew written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists -- as Hugh Kenner in Harper's wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.
Download or read book Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gilbert Sorrentino's third novel is about the New York artistic and literary world of the 1950s and '60s, specifically the artists, writers, hangers-on, and the phonies who populated that world. In a prose that is ruthless as well as possessed of an enormous comic verve, the dedicated, the stupid, the rapacious, and the foolish are dissected. Eight major characters, many of whom reappear in Sorrentino's later novels, are employed to allow the reader a variety of views of the same world. Told in the weary voice of a cynical and sardonic narrator, the novel is crammed with fantastic characters, incidents, and episodes, and moves from wit and satire through elegiac brooding, to bitter invective. It is a superb re-creation of a real time and place."--Publisher description.
Download or read book Aberration of Starlight written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy Recco, an eager ten-year-old in search of a father... Marie Recco, nee McGrath, an attractive divorcee caught between her son and father, without a life of her own... John McGrath, dignified in manner yet brutally soured by life, insanely fearful of his daughter's restlessness... Tom Thebus, a rakish salesman who precipitates the conflict between Marie's hopes and her father's wrath. What emerges is a sure understanding of four people who are occasionally ridiculous, but whose integrity and good intentions are consistently, and tragically, frustrated. Combining humor and feeling, balancing the details and the rhythms of experience, Aberration of Starlight re-creates a time and a place as it captures the sadness and value of four lives. First published by Random House in 1980, it is widely considered one of Sorrentino's finest novels.
Download or read book Red the Fiend written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and widen to reflect the hardships of Depression-era life.
Download or read book Gold Fools written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most recent novel by the noted American novelist Gilbert Sorrentino.
Download or read book Steelwork written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In short, colourful dramatic episodes, teh profoundly moving book details the collapse of a basically decent and honourable group of people into a corrupt and ignorant conglomeration.
Download or read book Little Casino written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nuances of a conventional world. A masterful collage of events is evocatively chained together by secrets and hidden truths that are almost accidentally revealed. Each episode, affectingly textured with penetrating detail, ferrets out the gristle and unconventional beauty found in the voices of the working-class inhabitants from an irretrievable, golden age Brooklyn.
Download or read book Something Said written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Commonwealth Secretariat. This book was released on 2001 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Crystal Vision written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue. In a series of seventy-eight short narratives, Gilbert Sorrentino perfectly captures the speech, illusions, and confusion of The Magician, Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie, and many others. Through formal inventiveness, Sorrentino liberates these characters from the confines of realism and gives us their world--zany, vulgar, hilarious, and exuberant.
Download or read book Gilbert Sorrentino written by William McPheron and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trajectory of Gilbert Sorrentino's literary life can be tracked in this bibliography, from his first short story in a 1956 issue of his college literary magazine, through his involvement with the New York publishing scene in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally into the 1980s and early 1990, when his work, as at the beginning, once again is being published by small presses. The bibliography treats writings both by and about Sorrentino, uniting in one volume exhaustive descriptive analyses of primary works with annotated treatment of secondary sources. It thereby serves the needs not only of scholars and collectors interested in the physical production of Sorrentino's books but also of literary critics concerned with matters of reception and interpretation.
Download or read book The Moon in Its Flight written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary.”—The New York Times “Sorrentino’s ear for dialects and metaphor is perfect: his creations, however brief their presence, are vivid, and much of his writing is very funny and clever, piled with allusions.”—The Washington Post Book World Bearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino’s first-ever collection of stories spans 35 years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. In these grimly comic, unsentimental tales, the always-memorable characters dive headlong into the wasteland of urban culture, seeking out banal perversions, confusing art with the art scene, mistaking lust for love, and letting petty aspirations get the best of them. This is a world where the American dream is embodied in the moonlit cocktail hour and innocence passes at a breakneck speed, swiftly becoming a nostalgia-ridden cliché. As Sorrentino says in the title story, “art cannot rescue anybody from anything,” but his stories do offer some salvation to each of us by locating hope, humor, and beauty amidst a prevailing wind of cynical despair. Gilbert Sorrentino has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry, including the classic Mulligan Stew and his latest novel, Little Casino, which was shortlisted for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. After two decades on the faculty at Stanford University, he recently returned to his native Brooklyn.
Download or read book Splendide Hotel written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1973 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each chapter serves as an opportunity for the author to expand on thoughts and images suggested by a letter of the alphabet, as well as to reflect upon the workings of the imagination, particularly in the art of William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. Reminiscent of the philosophical treatise/poem On Being Blue by William H. Gass, Splendide-Htel is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.
Download or read book The Orangery written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Sun & Moon. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. First published in 1978, THE ORANGERY is one of Gilbert Sorrentino's most memorable collections of poetry. Each poem is a variation on orange, which appears and reappears as a color, a fruit, a memory, an intrusion, a word seeking rhyme, a presence expected and awaited. As William Bronk wrote upon its original publication, In THE ORANGERY Sorrentino makes things which are hard, gaudy and sometimes scary... They are made to last.
Download or read book Odd Number written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews for a murder investigation lead to a study of the nature of fiction and reality themselves
Download or read book The Sky Changes written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as the husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that the marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the imaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged throughout the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work. And no other novel so perfectly captures the moral bankruptcy of the United States as a background to divorce.
Download or read book Under the Shadow written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Under the Shadow"?takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragments of conversation and gossip gathered here and there. They are reminiscent of Raymond Roussel's characters amid his inimitable ersatz pastorals, with tableaux both innocent and grotesque. There is something ambiguous about these passages, something deliberately closed and dreamlike. Many of them read like primal scenes of private pathologies; others are memories that, many years later, retain their power to haunt.
Download or read book Lunar Follies written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly entertaining journey through the vagaries of the art world, narrated by an acutely insightful raconteur.
