Gilbert Sorrentino

Author Information
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  • Bibliography:
    19 Books
  • First Book:
    July 1980
  • Latest Book:
    February 2010
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Book List in Order: 19 titles

  • Aberration of Starlight

    Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy ...

  • Odd Number

  • The Sky Changes

    Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable d...

  • Steelwork

    Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic e...

  • Under the Shadow

    "Under the Shadow"?takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragm...

  • Mulligan Stew

    Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrat...

  • Pack of Lies

    Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso. Beginning with a series of interrogations (we nev...

  • Splendide-Hotel.

  • Crystal Vision

    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 ...



  • Gold Fools

    Three teenage boys, Nort and Dick Shannon and their friend, Bud Merkel, find themselves in the middle of the forbidding Gila Desert on an adventure that will, they hope, lead them to the fabled riches of desert gold. Their guides, the grizzled prospe...

  • Blue Pastoral

    "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 mee...

  • Splendide-Hotel

    Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel," "built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night," provides the occasion for Sorrentino's imaginative meditation on letters and language. Each chapter serves as an opportunity for the author to expand ...

  • Little Casino

    An episodic novel of postwar working-class Brooklyn that offers “sometimes dreamy, sometimes gritty glimpses into ordinary lives” (Publishers Weekly). In a novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nu...

  • The Moon in Its Flight

    “Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary.” -- The New York T...

  • Lunar Follies

    The two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and author of Mulligan Stew paints a “clever parodic take on the contemporary art world” (Publishers Weekly). How often have you been subjected to supposed artists, art critics, or works of “art” tha...

  • A Strange Commonplace

    The author of Mulligan Stew presents “a savage, baffling and beguiling novel about the wreckage that infidelity leaves behind” (Kirkus Reviews). Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the sec...

  • Red the Fiend

    A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggress...

  • Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

    Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Among the best of Sorrentino's novels, Imaginative Qualities is also,...

  • The Abyss of Human Illusion

    “This fine, final work by Brooklyn native Sorrentino . . . finds a rueful charm in the ‘wretched clichés’ of ordinary failure.” -- Publishers Weekly Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fift...



Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Gilbert Sorrentino has published 19 books.

Gilbert Sorrentino does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Abyss of Human Illusion, was published in February 2010.

The first book by Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of Starlight, was published in July 1980.

No. Gilbert Sorrentino does not write books in series.
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