"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
.
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.
