Steelwork - Softcover

Sorrentino, Gilbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156478004X ISBN 13: 9781564780041

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992

Synopsis

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 episodes, the book details the collapse of a basically decent, homogeneous, and honorable group of people into a greedy, ignorant, and slipshod conglomeration, corrupted by money made available by the war economy. The neighborhood as a whole is the protagonist, although there are many characters who become familiar. Moving the way memory does, the narrative skips from episode to episode in no conventional time sequence, projecting indelible flashes of the past as they strike the mind. Gilbert Sorrentino has beautifully encompassed a section of America in this very human, funny, intelligent novel which re-creates perfectly the mood and the time of its inhabitants and its past.

About this title

About the Author:

In addition to his books of poetry and criticism, Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of fourteen novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, The Sky Changes, and Mulligan Stew. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award.

Review:

Artful, compressed and striking.

(Shaun O'Connell, Nation)

Powerfully evocative.

(Martin Levin New York Times Book Review)

[Steelwork] offers the usual Sorrentino pleasures: bitter humor, earthy realism, self-aware narration, long lists (one chapter enumerates various sexual myths), a sense of nostalgia that is frequently undercut, and an altogether addictive style.

(Washington Post Book World)

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 156478004X
• ISBN 13: 9781564780041
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177