Gilbert Sorrentino Books In Order

Misterioso

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. The charactersdespite the candor of their presentationremain 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.

The Sky Changes

Sorrentino”s first novel is a disturbing acc ount of the damage and pain inflicted on all concerned as a couple and their children journey from New York to San Franc isco, still holding on to an illusion that their marriage ca n be rescued. ‘

Steelwork

paperback of Sorrentino’s classic early novel

The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

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.

Mulligan Stew

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.

Aberration of Starlight

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, ne McGrath, an attractive divorce 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 methodsfantasies, 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. It is widely considered one of Sorrentino’s finest novels.

Crystal Vision

Fiction. Re printed by Dalkey Archive Press. 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, allusions, 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. ‘Crystal Vision is a remarkable work of transparence, both artfully faceted in its construction and vital full of speaking fossils in the life it remembers’ Thomas LeClair, Washington Post Book World.

Blue Pastoral

‘I see him now! Somewhere out there in that gloaming that we call the Past that Time forgot his ratty beard and frizzy hair, his hearty grease sandwiches, his rusted bicycle clips. An unlikely hero, your good faces seem to say…
.’ And so we meet our hero Serge ‘Blue’ Gavotte, a modern day Candide who quits his job, mounts a piano atop a broken down pushcart and sets off with wife and child on a visionary quest across contemporary America in search of the ‘Perfect Musical Phrase.’ From the dismal plains of the Midwest to the technicolor sunsets of the Southwest, Blue refuses to let financial troubles, lecherous professors or the burdensome weight of his piano prevent him from reaching his final goal. A work of art masquerading as artifice, Blue Pastoral is a madhouse production whose hilarious cast of styles and forms includes everything from Rabelaisian lists to Swiftian satires to parodies of such pastoral modes as the eclogue, the idyll, and the elegy.

Splendide Hotel

Arthur Rimbaud’s invented Splendide H 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 H tel is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

Red the Fiend

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.

Gold Fools

Three teenage boys, Nort and Dick Shannon and their friend, Bud Merkel, find themselves in the middle of the forbidding Gila Desert on an adventure that will, they hope, lead them to the fabled riches of desert gold. Their guides, the grizzled prospector, Hank Crosby, and the leathery old cowpoke, Billee Dobb, accompany them through blistering heat, savage sandstorms, and the dangers posed by the evil Del Pinzo and his sinister Indian companion, Zapto, men who want the treasure for themselves. In this brilliant, witty, yet fond burlesque of the boys’ adventure books, Sorrentino tells the story in interrogative sentences, forcing the reading to answer the very questions of the narrative itself.

Gilbert Sorrentino teaches at Stanford University.

Little Casino

In this novel of superbly stylized fragments of memory, Sorrentino captures the grit of golden era Brooklyn. Each episode, affectingly textured with naked detail, is followed by the narrator’s deeper, more subjective climb down to the very bones of pure, poetic recollection. The reader, as though privy to a penetrating pyschological confession, accompanies the narrator, ferreting out the gristle and unconventional beauty found among the scrappy immigrant boys, hard drinking blue collar stiffs, and poor, sexy, and magenta lipped women who inhabit the novel.

Lunar Follies

‘If it were possible, after reading a book as excoriatingly funny and purifying as Lunar Follies, to engage once again in the blurb business; if I didn t feel, as I always do after reading the great Gilbert Sorrentino, unsure of my every word, I might say this to you: Lunar Follies is an hilarious, playful, and protean book, resplendent with the qualities that have made Sorrentino a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative, no matter how clever and intelligent, and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, but for all that, cleansing, light.’ Jeffrey EugenidesIn writing that is bawdy, clever, irreverent, and wry, Sorrentino gathers a motley collection of art world aspirants, rejected writers, vacuous exhibitionists, and the discourse, trends, and corporate coddling that surround them. With precise comedic timing and an abundance of erotic detail, Lunar Follies skewers postmodern culture in a bitingly satiric tour of imaginary gallery, museum, and performance art exhibitions. These 53 ‘reviews,’ named after geographic features of the moon, provide a guide through the lunacy of a contemporary art world valiantly maintaining its pretensions.

A Strange Commonplace

‘Sorrentino is a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.’ Jeffrey Eugenides

‘For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique figure in our literature. He reminds us that fiction lives because artists make it. To the novel everyone’s novel Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.’ Don DeLillo

Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. Ensnared in a jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities from the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor familiar, tragic, and cathartic.

Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of more than 30 books, including Little Casino, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A critical and influential figure in postmodern American literature, he is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. His frequent appearances on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm can be heard at www. kcrw. org. Once an editor at Grove Press, Sorrentino is professor emeritus at Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn.

The Abyss of Human Illusion

To the novel everyone’s novel Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion. Don DeLillo Sorrentino is a writer like no other. He s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light. Jeffrey Eugenides For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid 20th century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word. Harry Mathews One of Brooklyn s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentino s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller s Coney Island, Henry Miller s and Betty Smith s Williamsburg, Hamill s and Auster s Park Slope, and Lethem s Boerum Hill. BookforumTitled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present.A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.

The Moon in Its Flight

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 thirty five 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.

‘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

Something Said

Throughout these seventy two critical pieces, Gilbert Sorrentino argues against the idea that fiction and poetry are only valuable for what they ‘tell us.’ His close readings of such influential writers as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg. Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, William Gaddis and Flann O’Brien demonstrates his concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.