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Pack of Lies: A TrilogyAuthor: Gilbert Sorrentino American Literature Series June 1997 580 pages, 6 x 9 Paperback, 1-56478-154-2 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.96 
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Book Description
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.About the Author
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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. |
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Praise
"Sorrentino has established an artistic beachhead over the past twenty years; one could think of him . . . as a sort of American literary conscience."—Washington Post"Perhaps in this consolidated form the trilogy will at last be recognized as the utterly significant work that it is . . . As this trilogy abundantly demonstrates, with its lampooning of everything from the art world to the conventions of Boy's Books to radical feminism to Nazi Germany, its pathologically insistent and sometimes frighteningly severe contempt for what falls short of the highest artistic standards, Sorrentino has never abandoned the pleasures of the imagination."—Cups
"Sorrentino's work demands rereading, indeed, demands revisions of the reading process, and in so doing is rewarding for several reasons."—Rain Taxi
"Odd Number extends and expands the exploration of the impossible limits of experience and language . . . Works that venture into this strange territory that eludes language inevitably are difficult and complex. Odd Number is no exception. Few authors now writing are as demanding as Gilbert Sorrentino—and few are as important."—Los Angeles Times
"In Odd Number . . . Sorrentino investigates yet another formal problem—the disintegration inherent in the investigative process. By calling into question the whole notion of truth, and trust, he manipulates the very nature of facts. Reality is always suspect. [He] is a master of artifice."—Washington Post
"The work of a sophisticated, meticulous artist with a gift for comedy, a perfect-pitch ear for American speech . . . Sorrentino surpasses even Flaubert in the contempt he lavishes upon a world portrayed with extraordinary craft. This is an easy book to put down, but worth not putting down in order to watch the writer's infinite invention."—Hudson Review
More Information
Also by Gilbert Sorrentino:Aberration of Starlight
Blue Pastoral
Crystal Vision
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Misterioso
Mulligan Stew
Red the Fiend
Something Said
Splendide-Hôtel
Steelwork
The Sky Changes
Under the Shadow