Here are completed chapters of my book-length career study of Gilbert Sorrentino, tentatively titled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. In finished form, the book will consist of critical analysis of all of Sorrentino's fiction from his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966), to his posthumously published The Abyss of Human Illusion (2010). These chapters cover The Sky Changes through Blue Pastoral (1983). Three additional chapters have been completed, with two further chapters (one of them an addendum of sorts) remaining. I hope to have the book finished sooner rather than later.
I still have vague hopes of sending the completed manuscript around for possible publication, but I have no illusions that it is the sort of book that would have many takers in the current publishing environment—too focused on strictly literary analysis (no biography, politics, historicizing, etc.) for university presses, and too “academic” in its analysis for nonacademic publishers. I envision as possible readers those interested in thinking more comprehensively about the achievement of this audaciously experimental writer whose work now seems in danger of going into eclipse at a time when his kind of aesthetically complex, formally daring fiction is no longer much valued.
I will make the finished book available online, in pdf form, and possibly as an ebook if it can’t find a publisher.