The Abyss of Human Illusion

(Paperback)

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To the noveleveryones novelSorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.Don DeLillo

Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. Hes learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentinos books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.Jeffrey Eugenides

For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.Harry Mathews

One of [Brooklyn]s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentinos Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamuds Crown Heights, Arthur Millers Coney Island, Henry Millers and Betty Smiths Williamsburg, Hamills and Austers Park Slope, and Lethems Boerum Hill.Bookforum

Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentinos final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passionan elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar charactersthe aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present

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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.

Author Bio

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. The son of Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino is a novelist and short story writer whose fictional account of the Patty Hearst saga, Trance, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn.