Gilbert Sorrentino

"Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. Ensnared in a jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities from the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and as an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor--familiar, tragic, and cathartic."--Publisher's website.

Skewers postmodern culture in a bitingly satiric tour or imaginary gallery, museum, and performance art exhibitions. These fifty-three "reviews", named after geographic features of the moon, provide a guide through the lunacy of a contemporary art world valiantly maintaining its pretentions.

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 thirty-five years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction.

Sorrentino subverts the Western novel with a ludicrous tale of hunting for gold narrated entirely in interrogative sentences.

FUNNY HOW LIFE CAN TURN YOU UPSIDE DOWN... My name is Bonita Torres, and eight months ago I was an unemployed college graduate without a plan. Now I’m an investigator with the Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations team of New York. Pretty awesome, right? The Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community, isn’t quick to give up its secrets, though. Not even to fellow members. Not even when it’s in their best interests. So we’ve been busting our tails, perfecting our forensic skills, working to gain acceptance. The team’s tight… but we have our quirks, too. And our Big Dog, Benjamin Venec…well, he’s a special case, all right. But we can’t give up. We’re needed, especially when a case comes along that threatens to pit human against fatae. But one wrong move could cost us everything we’ve worked for…

At least once a day, Red's grandmother beats him so severely that the snot flies out of his nose. The son of an absent drunk of a father and a passive-aggressive mother, Red is offered up as the scapegoat for all of Grandma's rage. Smacked, whipped, systematically humiliated and degraded while his cowed grandfather stands by, Red's anything but idyllic childhood mirrors the hardships his Irish-Catholic, Depression-era family suffers. Grandma's frustrations stem from a lifetime of disappointment. Once, before she was consumed by bitterness, life held promise for her, but the promise was never fulfilled. Someone must bear the burden of blame for the failure of her hopes, and Grandma is ingenious at devising methods to inflict pain on Red. What we witness is the making of a monster: Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. In elegant and gripping, brilliant prose, Gilbert Sorrentino has portrayed a world in which everyone is a victim, inescapably and hopelessly trapped in self-loathing and hatred.

"In Pat Frank's 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the character Helen says of her children: "All their lives, ever since they've known anything, they've lived under the shadow of war--atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal." The threat of nuclear annihilation was a constant source of dread during the Cold War, and in Under the Shadow, author David Seed examines how authors and filmmakers made repeated efforts in their work to imagine the unimaginable. Seed discusses classics of the period like Nevil Shute's On the Beach, but he also argues for recognition of less-known works such as Walter M. Miller's depiction of historical cycles in A Canticle for Leibowitz, Bernard Wolfe's black comedy of aggression in Limbo, or Mordecai Roshwald's satirical depiction of technology running out of human control in Level 7. Seed relates these literary works to their historical contexts and to their adaptations in film. Two prime examples of this interaction between media are the motion pictures Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, which dramatize the threat posed by the arms race to rationality and ultimate human survival. Seed addresses the attempts made by characters to remap America as a central part of their efforts to understand the horrors of the war. A particular subset of future histories is also examined: accounts of a Third World War, which draw on the conventions of military history and reportage to depict probable war scenarios. Under the Shadow concludes with a discussion of the recent fiction of nuclear terrorism."--Publisher's website.

"For over the 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 these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art.". "This new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984."--BOOK JACKET.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.