A novel by Gilbert Sorrentino

May 1, 2002 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 220 pages • 9781566891264

These episodes from a Brooklyn long gone astonish with their penetrating, subtle detail.

In this novel of superbly stylized fragments of memory, Sorrentino captures the grit of golden-era Brooklyn. Each episode, affectingly textured with naked detail, is followed by the narrator’s deeper, more subjective climb down to the very bones of pure, poetic recollection. The reader, as though privy to a penetrating psychological confession, accompanies the narrator, ferreting out the gristle and unconventional beauty found among the scrappy immigrant boys, hard-drinking blue-collar stiffs, and poor, sexy, and magenta-lipped women who inhabit the novel.

About the Author

A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006) was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr. and a confidant of William Carlos Williams. He is the author of the classic novels Mulligan Stew and Little Casino and over thirty other books, including A Strange Commonplace, Lunar Follies, The Moon in Its Flight, and The Abyss of Human Illusion. A former editor at Grove Press, Sorrentino taught at Stanford University for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn.

Reviews

“Each of the novel’s 52 chapters can stand as an individual (albeit fleeting) narrative, and when taken as such, the parts become more than the whole. By themselves, the chapters are easily digestible morsels of delicious prose self-contained stories that offer sometimes dreamy, sometimes gritty glimpses into ordinary lives.” —Publishers Weekly