User:Choor monster/sandbox/Gilbert Sorrentino
http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev7/r7mil.htm
Reception and more[edit]
The Sky Changes[edit]
The cover photograph is from Robert Frank's 1958 photobook The Americans. Reprint rights could not be secured for the 1986 North Point Press revised edition.
Published by Hill and Wang, with strong support from Arthur Wang prevailing over Lawrence Hill's dislike. Wang took out advertisements in NYTBR and NYRB. Time's reviewer was quite enthusiastic, the magazine sent a staff photographer to photograph GS, and then, without explanation, changed their mind and did not review the novel.[1]
Disclosing a world of rotten people and situations, The Sky Changes is not the glad, mad trop of Kerouac's On The Road but a bitter, more adult insight into hip America
— ?, Virginia Kirkus Service,34.5, 3/1/1966
A brilliant, beautiful book, The Sky Changes strips the disguises from our misery and meanness, disclosing life to be a constant but fascinating dance of pain
— Peter L. Douthit, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 3/27/1966
Explicit in detail yet sparingly written, The Sky Changes is a tragic tale of man's futile search for life's meaning
— Charles Hunter, Charleston Evening Post, 4/22/1966
The revised edition perfects The Sky Changes's pitch, rendering it a triumphant exercise in tone and color.
— Steven Moore, Review of Contemporary Fiction 8.2 (Summer 1988)
Steelwork[edit]
Steelwork is a kinetic scrapbook whose brilliant individual pieces mute the novel's bitterness at the tragic erosion of the American dream.
— ?, Kirkus Reviews, 8/1/1970
The scrambled chronology and arbitrary jumpcuts of Gilbert Sorrentino's method succeed in formally expressing Steelwork's themes of despair and senselessness.... Ultimately Gilbert Sorrentino's style redeems the work.
— Shaun O'Connell, Nation 212, 6/21/1971
Steelwork is a beautiful but deceptively simple book....[it] teaches about the simple day-by-day survival of man in his own world.
— Hubert Selby, Jr., Los Angeles Times, 11/1972, Calendar
Steelwork successfully captures the poetry and beauty as well as the squalor and pettiness of Brooklyn life
— Jon M. Warner, Library Journal 95.16, 11/15/1970
Splendide-Hôtel[edit]
These baroque prose poems pay deliberate homage to Rimbaud and Baudelaire
— ?, Publishers Weekly 204.11 (9/10/1973)
Precise language and synesthetic style transform this apocalyptic meditation on the exile of the heart into a genuine vision.
— Adrienne Gillespie, Library Journal 99.4 (2/15/1974)
Splendide-Hôtel is a defense of poetry which returns to the primary constructs of words in order to recover primary meanings and images.
— Sharon Fawcett, Open Letter 3rd ser. 5 (Summer 1976)
The brilliant prose poems feature visions of cataclysm.
— Joseph McLellan, Washington Post Book World 11/18/1973
Refusing to confuse fiction with the world, Sorrentino choses a completely artificial structure for Splendide-Hôtel, which keeps attention on the page itself. Neither a dull parahistorical record nor a bland metafiction recounting a second-order story, Sorrentino's fiction is instead something made, its substance controlled by its method.
— Jerome Klinkowitz, Village Voice Literary Supplement, 11/22/1973, reprinted in Klinkowitz The Life of Fiction (University of Illinois Press, 1977)
Mulligan Stew[edit]
Title: Synthetic Ink, written 1971-1975, rejected by over 30 publishers 1975-1978. "The publishers typically praised the novel, often extravagantly, but doubted its commercial viability, fearing that a book so long and so literary would not earn enough profits to justify production costs."[2]
Barney Rosset of Grove Press accepted the novel. Rosset asked Sorrentino to preface the text with some of the rejection letters, which Sorrentino did in parody form. Rosset further asked for a less obscure title. Sorrentino came up with Mulligan Stew, an obvious reference to the jumbled-up heterogeneous nature of the book's contents, but also a deliberate Joycean pun "Mulligan's Too", alluding to Buck Mulligan.[3]
McPherson cites over 70! reviews.
Brown, Harold, "Self-Reference in Logic and Mulligan Stew." Diogenes 118 (Summer 1982), pp 121-142.
Aberration of Starlight[edit]
Crystal Vision[edit]
Blue Pastoral[edit]
Odd Number[edit]
Rose Theatre[edit]
Misterioso[edit]
Bibliography[edit]
Fiction[edit]
- The Sky Changes (1966)
- revised, expanded, 1986
- Steelwork (1970)
- Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
- Splendide-Hôtel (short fiction/prose poetry, 1973)
- Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo (1974)
- excerpt from Mulligan Stew
- Mulligan Stew (1979)
- Aberration of Starlight (1980)
- Crystal Vision (1981)
- Blue Pastoral (1983)
- Odd Number (1985)
- A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles (short story, 1986), published in a limited edition, illustrated by David Storey
- originally published in Conjunctions, 1985. (Look this up!!)
- republished in The Moon in its Flight, 2004.
- Rose Theatre (1987)
- Misterioso (1989)
- Under the Shadow (1991)
- Red the Fiend (1995)
- Pack of Lies (1997)
- collects the trilogy Odd Number, Rose Theatre, Misterioso.
- Gold Fools (1999)
- Little Casino (2002)
- The Moon in its Flight (short fiction, 2004)
- Lunar Follies (short fiction, 2005)
- A Strange Commonplace (2006)
- The Abyss of Human Illusion (2010)
Poetry[edit]
- The Darkness Surrounds Us (1960)
- Black and White (1964)
- The Perfect Fiction (1968)
- Corrosive Sublimate (1971)
- A Dozen Oranges (1976)
- White Sail (1977)
- Sulpiciae Elegidia: Elegiacs of Sulpicia (1977) (Translator)
- The Orangery (1978)
- Selected Poems 1958-1980 (1981)
- New and Selected Poems 1958-1998 (2004)
Criticism[edit]
- Something Said (1984)
- expanded edition, 2001
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