The Moon in Its Flight

A series of miniature masterpieces sealing Gilbert Sorrentino’s reputation as the master of American avant-garde fiction.

Bearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, groundbreaking 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 when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.

Publication date: April 1, 2004

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 8

Page count: 268 pages

ISBN: 9781566891523

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

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.

“Gilbert Sorrentino’s brilliantly inventive, wickedly funny stories impart a truth that has the power of divination. Reading The Moon in Its Flightis sheer pleasure.”

—Walter Abish

“This exhilarating book has been long due, and certainly worth waiting for: one of our native geniuses here delivers all his nifty goods in the particularly accessible form of short stories. He is of course mad and modern and full of surprises; but perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that he emerges as a supreme realist. For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.”

—Harry Mathews

“Gilbert Sorrentino is a master. His ear is flawless, his eye deadly, his insight acute. In the stringency of their art these stories convey more genuine sympathy for sad, suffering, vile, deluded humanity than all the slovenly wheeze that is generally mistaken for ‘fine writing.’ And when they’re not breaking your heart, they’re very, very funny.”

—Carter Scholz