Mulligan Stew
Subtitle: a novel
By: by Gilbert Sorrentino.
Edition: 1st Dalkey Archive ed.
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Normal, IL
Language: eng
Number of pages: 445
Subjects: Characters and characteristics in literature -- Fiction; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) -- Fiction; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) -- Fiction; Fiction -- Authorship -- Fiction; Novelists -- Fiction
Description: 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 Hammett) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative.