French readers discover Gilbert Sorrentino through new translations

Three new French translations introduce American writer Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006) to a wider audience. Born in Brooklyn during the 1929 stock market crash, Sorrentino co-founded the literary magazine Neon with Hubert Selby Jr., worked as an editor at Grove Press (publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X), and taught at Stanford University from 1982 to 1999. His most famous novel, Mulligan Stew (1979), was translated by Bernard Hoepffner as Salmigondis and published by éditions Cent Pages in 2006. The book features experimental typography, varying ink intensities, and even baseball scorecards. The short story collection La Lune dans son envol (Actes Sud) showcases his Oulipo-inspired constraints and intertextual play. Sorrentino's work explores themes of failure, vanity, and sexual mishaps with a compassionate, humorous tone. His formalist approach is anything but cold, rooted in a moralist vision of life as a crash.