RIP Gilbert Sorrentino.

I bought "Aberration of Starlight" because I'll generally give Dalkey Archive things a bash.

I adore it, of the various non-linear novels based on whirls of images and words, it's probably my favourite, which is to say that I found it the most consistently engaging. I gave my copy away some time ago to a songwriter whose approach to melody and lyrics reminded me of "AoS". I never heard anything back from him so I guess he couldn't see what I was on about.

I must replace it sometime.

This guy seems to get it.

Anyway they even mention how they named Mulligan Stew a "Notable Book" or whatever the eyar it came out. I grant that's not the accolades they offer many other writers but it's hardly nothing.

http://lastexitmag.com/article/27-fragments-for-gilbert-sorrentino

Article linked upthread, "Sorrentino's Synthetic Ink-quisitions" by Anthony Miller, holds up. Here are some other links for reference:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gilbert-sorrentino
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/1997fall/packoflies.shtml
http://requitedjournal.com/index.php?/essay/jeremy-m-davies/

Also, the short story collection The Moon In Its Flight- the title story is a killer- and some of the later novels are now available as ebooks.

Bet you guys never knew about the Sorrentino Stegner brouhaha.

I know I didn't.

*tumbleweed*

*tundra*

hi there james.

I like the moon in its flight (story, haven't read the collection). Been meaning to check out more sorrentino

I love Under the Shadow. The language is masterful and the mood is incredible. Plus, it's short.

And yet, the obituary is such an impressive work of focused and directed indifference that now, years later, it has been suggested that the piece was a plant: that GS himself, or some other member of the little “deviant” horde of Sorrentinophiles, was trying, here, to be certain that death would not elicit any of the vacuous revisions we often see in popular appraisal.

Having a distinguished appointment to make, and with the whole English-speaking world to hunt in, [the English Department] came up with a coterie writer of minimum distinction

So his son Christopher has written a memoir which seems like a must read.

Some Sotobait right here:

She told me that he frequently embarrassed her by drinking too much, the spectacularly emblematic story here being the time my father managed, during a party at Dawn Powell’s home, to fall through a skylight.

Falling through a spotlight sober happens all the time.