Synopses & Reviews
Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement,
Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress.
As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists as Hugh Kenner in Harper's wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative.
Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.
Review
"Mulligan Stew is utterly dazzling...it sustains a display of linguistic virtuosity that takes your breath away." Washington Post
Review
"A tasty literary bouillabaisse that numbs and blows the mind." New York Times
Review
"A distinguished addition to contemporary post-realistic fiction." Library Journal
Review
"Sorrentino is an inventive, serio-comic writer with an enviable ability to draw desperate laughter out of the events and obsessions of everyday life. I found it a virtuoso performance, a roman candle of a book that time and time again made me laugh aloud." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"A work of true comic genius, it not only entertains and engages the intelligent reader, but also manages to shed light on the processes of literary creation." The Chronicle of Books & Arts
Review
"Mulligan Stew contains some of the best parodies since S. J. Perelman at his most manic, and perhaps the most corrosive satire of the literary scene since early Aldous Huxley." Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and entered Brooklyn College in 1950. It was at Brooklyn College that he made his first serious attempt at writing fiction. His college career, interrupted when he served in the US Army Medical Corps for two years, resumed at Brooklyn College in 1953 where he studied the classics. In 1956 he began Neon, a literary magazine for which he edited six issues. In the early '60s he was an editor and a contributor for Kulchur magazine and served as an editor for Grove Press from 1965-1970. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than thirty books, including the postmodern masterpieces Mulligan Stew and Aberration of Starlight. He taught creative writing at Stanford University for many years, and received, among many other awards and honors, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and the 2005 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He died on May 18, 2006.