Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn, New York, to August E. and Ann Davis Sorrentino. He married and was later divorced from Elsene Wiessner. He is now married to Victoria Ortiz, and he has three ...
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In Splendide-Hôtel (1973) Gilbert Sorrentino writes: "I agree with all those who wish to leave something behind that has the flash of the smallest truth. It is, I admit, sadly, sadly, so much of...
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Critical Essay by Sharon Fawcett [thesen]
Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hôtel is a splendid book. The Splendide-Hôtel ('built in a chaos of glaciers and the polar night&#...
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Critical Essay by Malcolm Bradbury
Since all literature is susceptible to parody, why not, then make parody literature? Gilbert Sorrentino has, with impressive results. "Mulligan Stew" ...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Grealish
The Orangery, a collection of 84 liberally formed sonnets, each containing a variation of the word "orange," is not about orange. True enough, though, ...
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Critical Essay by Valerie Trueblood
In 1971 Gilbert Sorrentino published a novel about poets, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a savage book full of judgments his acquintances must have prayed...
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Critical Essay by John Leonard
There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel ["Mulligan Stew"]. There is also a quest...
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Critical Essay by Ernest Larsen
Billed as a "new wave murder mystery" whose subject is really "the comic possibilities of modern literary history," Mulligan Stew appears t...
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Critical Essay by Martin Booth
[Gilbert Sorrentino's] work takes in the form and tradition of such writers as Rakosi, Bronk and, in emotive stance, Bly.
His diction is terse but not sparse ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Dirda
Let's begin with the essentials. Mulligan Stew is utterly dazzling. Its pedigree goes back, not to the well-made novel, but rather to the "anatomy"...
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Critical Essay by Thomas R. Edwards
Mulligan Stew is a quite wonderful book of literary joking and parody—if there had been no Joyce, no Gide or Sterne or Borges or Robbe-Grillet or Nabokov or...
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Critical Essay by Allen Lacy
A work of true comic genius, [Mulligan Stew] not only entertains and engages the intelligent reader, but also manages to shed light on the processes of literary creation,...
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Critical Essay by Denise Levertov
The prose criticism that Sorrentino has published in little magazines shows his power of making lucid distinctions. In poetry [as evidenced in The Darkness Surrounds...
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Critical Essay by Paul West
In Aberration of Starlight Gilbert Sorrentino uses procrastinated seduction not as voluptuous delay but as a gamble that just wasn't in the cards….
This i...
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Critical Essay by John Morse
Mulligan Stew was surely a remarkable book. Brawling and sprawling over hundreds of pages, it seemed to want to take on the world, satirizing, lampooning, and railing aga...
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Critical Essay by Josh Rubins
[It is] only to be expected that a new Gilbert Sorrentino novel is going to provoke skeptical whispers if it seems to have a "narrative"—one of the ...
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Critical Essay by Frank Cioffi
[Mulligan Stew] is a crazy quilt of popular culture, "sub-literary" genres, and unusual narrative voices. Its basic story of a novelist writing his most r...
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Critical Essay by Duane B. Schneider
[The Perfect Fiction] is a surprising collection of intellectual and evocative poems. As the title suggests, the poems are concerned with reality, which is depict...
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Critical Essay by Paul Theroux
[Gilbert Sorrentino's characters in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things] are like those stick figures that a lecturer sketches on a blackboard to illustrate a...
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Critical Essay by Lawrence Graver
["Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things"] is full of carefully planted instructions about how it must be read. Don't expect a story…. Fo...
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Critical Essay by Gregory Rabassa
[Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things captures] the feel of the fifties, an aimless decade nurtured on nostalgia, a time which of late and for some hollow reason h...
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Critical Essay by Jerome Klinkowitz
Gilbert Sorrentino is a veteran poet who began publishing fiction just about when critics were announcing its demise. The Sky Changes (1966), Steelwork (1970), Ima...
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Critical Essay by The Atlantic Monthly
A master of so-called experimental fiction, Sorrentino [applies in Aberration of Starlight] his impressive technical skills to the tale of a vacationing Brookly...
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Critical Essay by Garrett Epps
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino's last novel, was an over-stuffed, aggressively avant-garde portmanteau bulging with allusions to James Joyce and Flann O...
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Critical Essay by Guy Davenport
"Aberration of Starlight" openly steals from Joyce, O'Nolan [Flann O'Brien], and Doctorow's "Ragtime." It is fashionab...
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Gilbert Sorrentino
Critical Essay by Sharon Fawcett [thesen]
