Bøker av Gilbert Sorrentino

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.

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. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary 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. 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.

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. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this brilliant novel masterfully dissects the art world's culture of corruption and compromise, and in so doing examines the social and political malaise that continues to have a grip on modern America. One of Gilbert Sorrentino's most engaging novels, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is often named among the most important novels of the last several decades.

Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable 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 through 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.

The Tarot deck as read from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, circa the late Forties and early Fifties. A candy-store (or bar or street corner) symposium on life, love, and storytelling. An eruption of local voices approaching Dantean - but hilarious - clamor. A display of inventiveness whose sneaky expanses depend on non sequiturs that Woody Allen would envy, on satires of flowery style. A companion-piece to Steelwork (1970). Yes, Sorrentino's new novel is all these things, and one thing more, which gives its title a justification beyond all the laughs: a closely woven examination of symbols - with the proposition that they are actually fateful choices; either that or judgments. Calvino's likewise Tarot-based The Castle of Crossed Destinies shares similar concerns, but Calvino is nowhere the irrepressible vaudevillian that Sorrentino is. Trotted out here, while drinking Mission cream sodas, eating Mrs. Wagner's pies and root beer barrels, waiting for the early Mirror, are such neighborhood luminaries as: aspiring litterateur Richie; acneous Big Duck; The Arab, master of baroque malapropisms; Professor Kooba; Santo Tuccio the movie buff; Fat Frankie; Little Mickey; Cheech; and The Drummer. Each has a story to tell (and overrule) each other, and all of them ere under the ultimate spell of an elusive symbolic character called "the Magician" - who, this being Sorrentino, is as hapless as the guys in the candy-store. (Magically arranging for an angel-with-trumpet to appear on a gas-station wall during a war-time night of free movies, the Magician can't, however, get the angel to make a sound, having neglected to make an angel that knows how to play a horn.) The comedy is marvelously broad throughout - especially when The Arab offers his just-slightly-off disquisitions: "I despise and abbhorate the baseball. . . . And akinly, all sporting ventures. Save the racing ovals and their equine contests which oft are of a spectaculous beauty"; or "It nudges and bunks into the tragic that you did not consider gleaning this information, Billy." And set-pieces (a Sorrentino specialty) are here in force and quality: a declasse gossip column, a list of old-time Brooklyn candies, a Hungarian folk tale. But under all the laughs and exuberant polyphony, Sorrentino does an extremely crafty thing: he makes these sweet slobs bear the task of explaining symbol and illusion. ("A wedge of pie then. Suppose you have it and that it stands for a triangle. Suddenly, Big Duck, let's say, comes along, his acne is goddamn growling. And he stuffs the pie into his mouth. What about that?") Never merely the maker of high-modernist yet rude entertainments, Sorrentino also always strives to produce literary correctives. And rarely has he done the job so well, so radically, so comically as in this fluorescent, subtly amalgamated book - one of his best. (Kirkus Reviews)

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.

For over four decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has produced brilliant, penetrating essays and reviews, each one an uncompromising statement of what is good - and what is not - in literature and culture. Something Said collects in a single volume these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art. Featuring seventy-two pieces in all, this new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984, and demonstrates Sorrentino's concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.

Presents 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.