Ralph Cusack Gilbert Sorrentino Gilbert Sorrentino
First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and orders out sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.
First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap ...
"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;...
"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...
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 art and society, and a vicious comedy portraying a world of fraud and mayhem.
Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy...
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,...
Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the stre...
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...
Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a f...
"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...
"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 san...
David Andrews, Gilbert Sorrentino David Andrews, The Art Is the Act of Smashing the Mirror: A Conversation with Gilbert Sorrentino John Beer, Robert L. McLaughlin, Mary CaponegroWilliam Gaddis Joy Castro, Margery Latimer
David Andrews, Gilbert Sorrentino David Andrews, The Art Is the Act of Smashing the Mirror: A Conversation with Gilbert Sorrentino John Beer, Robert L...
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...
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. ...