Fiction. Bearing his trademark balance between equisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans 35 years of his writing careeer and includes new works alongside seminal ones. Sorrentino's fictional world is one in which the American dream is embodied in the moonlit cocktail hour, innocence passes at a breakneck speed and "art cannot rescue anybody from anything." Yet his stories do offer some kind of salvation by locating hope, humor and beauty amidst cynicism and despair. Sorrentino "has long been one of our mosts intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary"--The New York Times.

Author City: Brooklyn, NY USA

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.