Gilbert Sorrentino

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Among the best of Sorrentino's novels, Imaginative Qualities is also, quite simply, the best American novel ever written about writers and artists.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

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.

A Novel

Mulligan Stew

"Titled after a line from Henry James, The Abyss of Human Illusion consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion - an elegiac paean to the grimly comic, unsentimental, and quintessentially American world Gilbert Sorrentino so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career."--Jacket.

The Abyss of Human Illusion

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.

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.

Red the Fiend

“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.

The Moon in Its Flight

Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel", "built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night," provides the occasion for Sorrentino's imaginative meditation on letters and language. 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. Glass, "Splendide-Hotel" is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

Splendide-Hôtel

A series of miniature masterpieces sealing Gilbert Sorrentino's reputation as the master of American avant-garde fiction.

Stories

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.

Little Casino

Aberration of Starlight

The Masque of Fungo

Flawless Play Restored

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.

Steelwork

Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso. Beginning with a series of interrogations (we never do find out why they are being conducted) about characters drawn from other Sorrentino novels and concluding with the reappearance of the same characters, Pack of Lies is Gilbert Sorrentino's testament to the supremacy of the imagination, a critique of the state of art and society, and a vicious comedy portraying a world of fraud and mayhem.

Pack of Lies

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.

Under the Shadow

Arthur Rimbaud's invented Splendide-HÃ´tel, "built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night," provides the occasion for Gilbert Sorrentino's imaginative meditation on letters and language. 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-HÃ´tel is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

Meditation on Rimbaud

Splendide-Hotel

Misterioso is the final work of Gilbert Sorrentino's trilogy, the first two volumes of which, Odd Number and Rose Theatre, attempted to discover the shifting, evasive truth concerning a myriad of characters, all vaguely connected with the arts, whose lives become more contradictory and unaccountable the more we learn about them. In Misterioso, set on the last Sunday of August 1982, an encyclopedic survey is made of all the people, places, and objects from the first two novels. Beginning and ending at an A&P supermarket, the novel spontaneously generates out of the store's rack of "magazines which promise stories of action," a trashery of ludicrous and perverse exploits and ads well suited to the actions of the novel's large cast of ludicrous and perverse characters and the trashy culture they inhabit. All hope of discovering the truth behind the apparent death of Sheila Henry (in Odd Number) is finally abandoned in this hilarious attempt to organize the facts, a task made hopeless by new information that contains further facts and incidents, scenarios and conversations, as isolate, mysterious, and ambiguous as ever. How does one account for the procession of flight attendants, all named Karen, who break in with chipper greetings from the skies? Or the frequent apparitions of buffoonish demons and devils like "Astaroth, Angel of earthly Beauty, a luscious broad with a knockout figure and a lot of bad threads?" And what is one to make of Buddy and His Boys on Mystery Mountain, the obstreperously overwritten text that keeps interrupting the orderly progression of the novel? The characters--despite the candor of their presentation--remain unknowable. A masquerade of the substantive, Misterioso is a comic inquiry into details that are, at once, revelatory and enigmatic, and concludes a major fiction series of the 1980s.

Misterioso

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 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. We follow these individuals through the events of thirty-six hours, culminating in Tom's disastrous near seduction of Marie. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of these characters, four discrete stories take form, stories that Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods--fantasies, letters, a narrative question-and-answer, fragments of dialogue and memory. Strong and unforgettable, each voice is compelling in itself, yet in the end is only part of a complex, painful pattern in which dreams go unfulfilled and efforts unrewarded. 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.

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.

Gilbert Sorrentino

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