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With John Beer, Robert Burton, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Giles Gordon, Eugene Hayworth, Christine Hume, Jim Knipfel, Ben Marcus, Harry Mathews, Ann Quin, Francois Rabelais, Gilbert Sorrentino, Gertrude Stein, John Taylor, Curtis White
Context Gilbert Sorrentino Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and entered Brooklyn College in 1950. It was at Brooklyn College that he made his first serious attempt at writing fiction. His college career, interrupted when he served in the US Army Medical Corps for two years, resumed at Brooklyn College in 1953 where he studied the classics. In 1956 he began Neon, a literary magazine for which he edited six issues. In the early '60s he was an editor and a contributor for Kulchur magazine and served as an editor for Grove Press from 1965-1970. He has published thirty books of fiction and poetry, including two novels that were finalists for the PEN / Faulkner award: Little Casino and Aberration of Starlight. A recipient of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and two Guggenheim Fellowships, he was a professor at Stanford University for many years. He died in 2006. 
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...
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...
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...
Something Said 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...
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...
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...
Crystal Vision 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.
The Sky Changes 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...
Pack of Lies: A Trilogy 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...
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...
Steelwork 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...
Under the Shadow 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...
Rose Theatre 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...
Splendide-Hôtel From A to Z, from Alpha to Omega, Splendide-Hôtel encompasses the natural movement and necessity of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to grow into words which become phrases and sentences and paragraphs. Each of the twenty-six chapters becomes an...
Afterword by Gilbert Sorrentino 
Cadenza Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world...
With Gilbert Sorrentino 
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