The Abyss of Human Illusion - Softcover

Sorrentino, Gilbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566892333 ISBN 13: 9781566892339

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2010

Synopsis

“To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo

“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 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

“One of [Brooklyn]’s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud’s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller’s Coney Island, Henry Miller’s and Betty Smith’s Williamsburg, Hamill’s and Auster’s Park Slope, and Lethem’s Boerum Hill.”—Bookforum

Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion—an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters—the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present

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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.

About this title

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. The son of Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino is a novelist and short story writer whose fictional account of the Patty Hearst saga, Trance, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn.

From Publishers Weekly:

This fine, final work by Brooklyn native Sorrentino (1929-2006), author of A Strange Commonplace, finds a rueful charm in the "wretched clichés" of ordinary failure. Edited by his son, Christopher Sorrentino, after the author's death, the novel is comprised of 50 brief, narrative set pieces: a grab bag of memories from childhood, serving in the army, first love, failing marriage, and (presumably) the writer's own life, alternating with a perplexed and paralyzing present. In one instance, a young working-class husband looks miserably for a sign that will reveal the truth behind his wife's demeaning treatment of him. In another, two idealistic school friends-one becoming an English teacher, the other an L.A. talent scout-grow estranged over the years due to the perception of the other's critical scorn. Another piece finds a solitary old man "childless and thrice-divorced," beginning a catalog of all the grievances of his life until it becomes his sole pursuit, bringing him satisfaction and even "a shabby euphoria." Sorrentino's characters take a grim pleasure in stripping life of its illusions.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1566892333
• ISBN 13: 9781566892339
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 151