Bøger i American Literature (Dalkey Archive) serien

For over four decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has produced brilliant, penetrating essays and reviews, each one an uncompromising statement of what is good - and what is not - in literature and culture. Something Said collects in a single volume these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art. Featuring seventy-two pieces in all, this new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984, and demonstrates Sorrentino's concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.

While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.

The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United Statess greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary-and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass's The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, or Peter Nadas's Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the '60s and '70s.

For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal¿s dictum for writers of ¿twenty lines a day, genius or not.¿ What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer¿s manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews¿s life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.

In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.

Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study.

Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments, and rare pleasures of family, romance, and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary characters, four discrete stories take form, stories that Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods--fantasies, letters, a narrative question-and-answer, fragments of dialogue and memory. Combining humor and feeling, balancing the details and the rhythms of experience, Aberration of Starlight re-creates a time and a place as it captures the sadness and value of four lives.

A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this brilliant novel masterfully dissects the art world's culture of corruption and compromise, and in so doing examines the social and political malaise that continues to have a grip on modern America. One of Gilbert Sorrentino's most engaging novels, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is often named among the most important novels of the last several decades.

This bitterly funny memoir reads like an expose of the power structures in America s higher education system: who s got it, how they re abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and the social cost of doing educational business this way.

What Waiting Really Means is about emergencies that never reach the emergency room. It's about a woman named Mary with no last name who rides buses and smokes cigars and watches the wind blow her bedroom curtains into a frenzy. It's about cities, Detroit, New York, and Atlanta, About older men. The kind who will hold you. And killers, And the boundaries they look for. The narrator is sure of one thing; "Men who wear Brooks Brothers suits and pretend to read books are a step backward, and not far enough back, at that, "She's better off with her cigars at the Majestic Grill waiting while the rain beats on the windows.

In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea Of Home, he attempts to imagine "a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo - a post-war, prefabricated suburb in California - where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel. From the vantage point of anoff-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea Of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.

This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chap. 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write. Mixed in with her meditations on writing are daily events in her marriage to Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. As she writes at one point, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything, " so everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

Jarleth Pendergast in an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, and a desperate man whose career as an avant-garde claymation artist is going nowhere. Notified about a possible inheritance at the beginning of the book, Jarleth enters on a course of rampant self-destruction, narrating all his adventures to a deceased Irish lawyer. "One of the funniest books I've read in the past several years," according to Harvey Pekar, this first novel is a mad, sad, and profoundly funny book.

Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human). In an America where everyone keeps a secret website, and where a modern Prophet can only weep at the stories he hears, Requiem reveals our past, present and future with wit, sadness, and complete honesty.

Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged through the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work.