Yo, any of you dudes into Gilbert Sorrentino?

*most of mid-late 20th century lit.

I'm surprised that almost all of his books are near out of print

They're not.

https://id409.van.ca.siteprotect.com/centerforbookculture/dalkey/backlist/sorrentino_gilbert.html

he's never -ever- discussed when late 20th century literature pops up

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_06/howard.html

Well, do you have anything else to say, or did you just post that stuff to be a douchebag?

i posted that stuff to be a douchebag.

however

i didn't like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. it never really jelled for me as a novel. the entire time i read it, i thought to myself: He's making fun of all these NYC art people, but I feel like I need a concordance to figure out who is who. Eh.

Mulligan Stew was very very funny as I recall. . .but I read it last summer and I realize now I don't remember a thing about it except for a funny list of books and magazines on a character's shelf.

My favorite is The Sky Changes, a bleak, brutal travelogue, just totally sad and depressing and great.

I'm going to read Aberration of Starlight soon-ish here

Yeah, you get the Imaginative Qualities, but not so much the Actual Things he's talking about. I think some of it parallels to what you find in NYC today, so I just filled it in with what I've experienced from that.

I'm reading Mulligan Stew right now and it's pretty fun so far.

and I guess what I meant about "nobody talking about him" is that he seems lost in the shuffle of mid-late century experimental authors. Like, you get a million NPR-accented nitwits who rave about Perec's cunning lack of using the letter E (to write one of the worst narratives I've ever read), but Sorrentino, Matthews, etc., don't ring as much of a bell. It's probably just up to fashion.

mid-late century experimental authors

i see/read his name all the time as associated with this era

oHHHHHH, it's probably just the people I encounter then. It just seemed like he wasn't as popular as a lot of others.

he defintely wasn't, he's a little lower on the radar i think but yeah.

Matthews I don't know from, but Mathews gets mentioned fairly often.

Har har.

I'm pretty sure we have a Sorrentino thread somewhere in the archive.

he's maybe a little lower on the radar in that his books tend to already assume a buncha knowledge that others don't - like mulligan stew assumes you know a buncha lamenesses about the 'postmodern novel', & imaginative qualities a buncha lamenesses about the fiction of the 50s-60s beats&hipsters

hubert selby jr. credits sorrentino with teaching him how to write in at least one introduction � does it show? mebbe �

ILB has RIP gilbert sorrentino
RIP Gilbert Sorrentino.
ILE has the plainer thread
Gilbert Sorrentino

huh chris for some reason i thought you were a fan of mulligan stew

You'd think, right?

We've done this before.

Does that make it suitably Sorrentinian?

Nope.

I didn't know that the Dalkey Archive had a street team.

I didn't take advantage of that ridiculous 100 books for $500 deal they had at one point, or whatever it was, if that's what you're saying.

I just came across Imaginative Qualities of Real Things on a booklist I was looking at. Thought it looked interesting so I was just thinking of ordering it as an Interlibrary loan. It's not a quick read then?

Someone said that upthread? Oh I see. No you can read it pretty quickly. I know I did.