GILBERT SORRENTINO
GILBERT SORRENTINO
The remarkable--and remarkably unread--American novelist/essayist/provocateur Gilbert Sorrentino died little more than six years ago, but he refuses to be forgotten. A good many of his books remain in print thanks to publishers like Coffee House Press and Dalkey Archive Press; perhaps more readers will give him a chance after reading “Gilbert Sorrentino and Mulligan Stew,” a collection of critical pieces published in Dalkey’s Review of Contemporary Fiction series. The emphasis is on “Mulligan Stew,” an explosion of a novel, but there are also terrific essays on other books by, among others, Jonathan Lethem, Marjorie Perloff, and Vijay Seshadri. I got the chance to write about my favorite Sorrentino, his lethal and funny “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things,” which, forty years later, is probably still the last word on New York’s world of art and artists.
The remarkable--and remarkably unread--American novelist/essayist/provocateur Gilbert Sorrentino died little more than six years ago, but he refuses to be forgotten. A good many of his books remain in print thanks to publishers like Coffee House Press and Dalkey Archive Press; perhaps more readers will give him a chance after reading “Gilbert Sorrentino and Mulligan Stew,” a collection of critical pieces published in Dalkey’s Review of Contemporary Fiction series. The emphasis is on “Mulligan Stew,” an explosion of a novel, but there are also terrific essays on other books by, among others, Jonathan Lethem, Marjorie Perloff, and Vijay Seshadri. I got the chance to write about my favorite Sorrentino, his lethal and funny “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things,” which, forty years later, is probably still the last word on New York’s world of art and artists.
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