A Strange Commonplace - Softcover

Sorrentino, Gilbert

3.75

81 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891825 ISBN 13: 9781566891820

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2006

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“Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides

“For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique figure in our literature. He reminds us that fiction lives because artists make it. ...To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo

Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. Ensnared in a jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities from the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor—familiar, tragic, and cathartic.

Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of more than 30 books, including Little Casino, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A critical and influential figure in postmodern American literature, he is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. His frequent appearances on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm can be heard at www.kcrw.org. Once an editor at Grove Press, Sorrentino is professor emeritus at Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn.

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About the Author:

A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.

From Publishers Weekly:

In two sets of 26 brief tales each, Sorrentino (Little Casino) puts life's losers through their paces. Like ever-widening rings in a pond of purposeful noir clich�, their sad-sack stories, some of which share titles across the book's two parts, intentionally fail to connect: "Pair of Deuces" in the first part, for example, listens in on an aged card player ruminating in a retirement home on his lifetime of runs of bad luck, while "Pair of Deuces" in the second part tracks the hopelessly mismatched couplings of Jenny and Ralph and Inez and Bill over Christmastime. "A Small Adventure" in each part follows the fantasies of several wretched, abandoned wives who set out for a bit of sexual fun and revenge. Elsewhere, man leaves wife for floozie secretary; beautiful woman becomes both an object of desire and a victim of sickness and abuse; a barely acquainted couple decide in a wildly futile stab at romance to meet in a year at Rockefeller Center. Sorrentino's virtuosic vernacular shifts convincingly to match different genders and stations. His erratic permutations on familiar themes are set in an anachronistic everyday and somehow manage to be strange, striking and unsettling even as they deliver doom after doom. (May)
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