"... Bay Ridge is a neighborhood in the southwestern corner of Brooklyn. ... By the time Gil was born, in 1929, Bay Ridge wasn’t the countryside. Anyone who’s read Steelwork or Crystal Vision or Red the Fiend or Little Casino or A Strange Commonplace or The Abyss of Human Illusion knows Gil’s Bay Ridge was no artists’ colony. The streets in his Brooklyn books are home to an insular neighborhood-culture of poolrooms, taverns and candystores, populated by the unhappily married and the miserably unattached, vets and laborers and middle managers, all addicted to alcohol, all sexually frustrated—or, rather, sexually frenzied—people whom Sorrentino succinctly describes in A Strange Commonplace as 'tough, flexible and distrustful of crude irony.' ..."
Hey Ridge
The First Gentrifiers
Gilbert Sorrentino: The Lost Laureate of Brooklyn
The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation: Gilbert Sorrentino
2012 January: Gilbert Sorrentino, 2015 April: The Orangery (1978)
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