Under the Shadow

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Overview

"Under the Shadow" takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragments of conversation and gossip gathered here and there. They are reminiscent of Raymond Roussel's characters amid his inimitable ersatz pastorals, with tableaux both innocent and grotesque. There is something ambiguous about these passages, something deliberately closed and dreamlike. Many of them read like primal scenes of private pathologies; others are memories that, many years later, retain their power to haunt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780916583934
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/01/1991
Series:	American Literature
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	137
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

In addition to his books of poetry and criticism, Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of fourteen novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, The Sky Changes, and Mulligan Stew. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award.

Editorial Reviews

Long after you have turned the last page, Under the Shadow goes on inhabiting your thoughts and activating your imagination. This is a virtuoso performance by our most original writer. Read it, you'll like it.

Dallas Morning News

Under the Shadow is a rare contemporary work that is wise enough to allow the reader to be a collaborator in the production of meaning rather than a consumer of another's literary mirage.

San Francisco Chronicle

A rare specimen of the genre: an intellectual page-turner.

Publishers Weekly

Sorrentino crafts this intellectual page-turner, arguably his best work to date, out of 59 independent, short, surreal tales. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These 59 sketches--inventive elaborations of half-recalled images--combine a Joycean sensibility with the linguistic playfulness of Robert Coover. Several characters appear in more than one vignette along with recurring images that include a half-clad woman by a kitchen window, a snowman, and three women dressed in white by a dark lake. There is some discussion of signs and signifiers and their relationship to object. Sorrentino pokes fun at literary theory and critical methodology while at the same time using insights derived from such theories. His form is perfect, and his method presents the reader with a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle, yielding a haunting and powerful reading experience. Recommended for contemporary literature collections.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal