Background
Sorrentino, Gilbert was born on April 27, 1929 in Brooklyn. Son of August E. and Ann Marie (Davis).
( Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the ...)
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.
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(Misterioso is the final work of Gilbert Sorrentino’s tril...)
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.
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(Soft cover book titled THE DARKNESS SURROUNDS US by Gilbe...)
Soft cover book titled THE DARKNESS SURROUNDS US by Gilbert Sorrentino. Poets first book. Published by Jonathan Williams in 1960. With illustrated frontispiece portrait of poet. See my photographs (4) of this publication on main listing page. Bookseller since 1995 (LL-2-middle-up) rareviewbooks
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( Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summe...)
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.
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(Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innova...)
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.
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( Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel," "built in ...)
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.
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(Rose Theatre is the second book of the Sorrentino trilogy...)
Rose Theatre is the second book of the Sorrentino trilogy, the first book of which, Odd Number, was published in 1985. Odd Number investigated the ways in which "facts" assert themselves through the various encodings of experience contained in the answers to a rigidly circumscribed set of questions; i.e., the answers, whether colored by prejudice, opinion, distortions both conscious and unconscious, or presented as objective retorts based upon absolute data, reveal themselves as wholly incapable of telling anything that might be construed as the truth. As the book progresses, all is contradicted, refuted, thrown into turmoil. Rose Theatre, concentrating on data already posited, plus new data, endeavors to "correct" the errors of Odd Number. Everything is filtered through the experiences attendant upon the lives of the major female characters of the first book, yet as we read we discover that the new information has no authority to dispel the data given therein. Rather, Rose Theatre, in its desire to stabilize and clarify, adds new and unsettling material to that which we already possess. By turns, both deeply sinister and wildly comic, Rose Theatre continues Sorrentino's assault on the idea of realism in fiction, culminating here in a world that is in every way as mysterious, beguiling, and filled with contradictions as the one we inhabit each day.
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( “For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique ...)
“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 “Possessing both the grace of James Joyce and the snap and crackle of Tom Wolfe, Sorrentino is a must-read for those who fancy fiction served on wry.”—Booklist “Far from being overly highbrow, Sorrentino manages to be thrillingly disorienting and, at the same time, quite accessible.”—BookSense.com “Sorrentino has shown himself a perfect mimic of the information age, an era when all is revealed and no one can quite remember who appeared on the cover of last week’s People.”—The Washington Post A boyhood friend of the late Hubert Selby, Jr., teacher of Jeffrey Eugenides and two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Gilbert Sorrentino is an elder statesman of American literature who continues to transgress artistic boundaries. In Lunar Follies, a bitingly satiric, imaginative tour of gallery, museum and performance art exhibitions, Sorrentino skewers the pretensions of the contemporary art world and its flailing attempts at relevance in a society whose attentions have strayed to the immediacy of pop culture. With precise comedic timing and an eye toward lascivious detail, Sorrentino is the perfect guide through this deliciously absurd world. Gilbert Sorrentino has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry, including the story collection, The Moon in Its Flight, and the recent novel, Little Casino, which was shortlisted for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. After two decades on the faculty at Stanford University, he now lives in his native Brooklyn, New York.
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(Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's...)
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.
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(Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture...)
Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic episodes, the book details the collapse of a basically decent, homogeneous, and honorable group of people into a greedy, ignorant, and slipshod conglomeration, corrupted by money made available by the war economy. The neighborhood as a whole is the protagonist, although there are many characters who become familiar. Moving the way memory does, the narrative skips from episode to episode in no conventional time sequence, projecting indelible flashes of the past as they strike the mind. Gilbert Sorrentino has beautifully encompassed a section of America in this very human, funny, intelligent novel which re-creates perfectly the mood and the time of its inhabitants and its past.
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( Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualitie...)
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.
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( "I see him now! Somewhere out there in that gloaming th...)
"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.
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( In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, G...)
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.
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( “Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intel...)
“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.
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( A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, th...)
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.
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( Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, ?"M...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1564780872/?tag=2022091-20
literature and language professor novelist poet
Sorrentino, Gilbert was born on April 27, 1929 in Brooklyn. Son of August E. and Ann Marie (Davis).
Student, Brooklyn College, 1950—1951. Student, Brooklyn College, 1954—1955.
In various positions, 1947-1970. Including reinsurance clerk Fidelity and Casualty Company, New York City, 1947-1948. Freight checker Ace Assembly Agency, 1954-1956.
Packer Bennett Brothers Inc., 1956-1957. Messenger American Houses, Inc., 1948-1949. Shipping-room supervisor Thermo-fax Sales, Inc., Queens, New York, 1957-1960.
Editor Grove Press, 1965-1970. Teacher Columbia University, 1966, Aspen Writers Workshop, 1967, Sarah Lawrence College, 1972, The New School for Social Research, 1976—1981. National Endowment of the Humanities chairperson in literature University Scranton, 1979.
Professor English Stanford University, California, 1982—1999, professor emeritus, 1999—2006. Editorial consultant Contemporary Literature, 1989-1997. With United States Army, 1951-1953.
(Misterioso is the final work of Gilbert Sorrentino’s tril...)
( Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the ...)
( Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summe...)
(Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture...)
(Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innova...)
( Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel," "built in ...)
( "I see him now! Somewhere out there in that gloaming th...)
( Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualitie...)
( Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, ?"M...)
( A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, th...)
( In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, G...)
(Rose Theatre is the second book of the Sorrentino trilogy...)
(A story using the structure of a traditional Greek chorus...)
( “Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intel...)
( “For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique ...)
(Soft cover book titled THE DARKNESS SURROUNDS US by Gilbe...)
(Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's...)
(Poetry from Gilbert Sorrentino. A Black Sparrow Press book.)
(Book by Sorrentino, Gilbert)
(1st Dalkey Archive e)
(First Edition)
(2nd)
Member Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center.
Son of; married Victoria Ortiz. Children: Jesse, Delia, Christopher.