From Publishers Weekly
This collection of new and old stories from poet and novelist Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew) hews to a self-consciously modernist agenda. Many of the pieces are different versions of a single narrative about adulterous triangles connecting mediocre writers, their sexually voracious wives and their backstabbing business associates, set in a sour New Yorkâ€"San Francisco milieu of beatnik literary wannabes and "deadbeats." The caustic realism of these stories about the falsity of art and love in postwar urban America is accompanied by an ironic meta-commentary on the falsity of literary realism itself, in which Sorrentino bemoans the unreliability of the narrator, advertises his own writerly artifices ("Now I come to the literary part of the story.... I grant you it will be unbelievable") and decries the middlebrow conventions that make such artifice commercially necessary. His own highbrow allegiances are proclaimed in hallucinatory passages composed of the sort of cryptic non sequiturs ("Bossed by one schemer, so slow in sliding along the blue, horizontal mime who had stretched from one hem to the next, an idle guttersnipe bawled in humping a whore whom a pimp's trull had long since sassed") his admirers call "Joycean" for their intense, enigmatic imagery. But underneath Sorrentino's cynical tone and avant-garde stylings, his themes-art corrupted by ambition and commerce, youthful desire corrupted by marriage-reveal him to be a romantic at heart. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Fans of experimental verse will embrace the bracing ways of this first-ever collection of short stories by prolific avant-garde writer and poet Gilbert Sorrentino. Encompassing original work and pieces previously published in Esquire, Harper's, and The Best American Short Stories, the volume offers a literary dim sum that dazzles with detailed narration, self-commentary, and linguistic acrobatics both ingenious and perverse. Summer romance is the theme of the title piece, in which a self-deprecating narrator speaks directly to readers, asking them to "bear with me and see with what banal literary irony it all turns out--or does not turn out at all." From the sexual hunger of a terminally ill woman to a husband's erotic fixation with his wife's facial flaw, Sorrentino portrays a mad, modern world where pursuit of pleasure is the overriding m.o. Possessing both the grace of James Joyce and the snap and crackle of Tom Wolfe, this insightful offering by the two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist is a must-read for those who fancy fiction served on wry. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
_Gilbert Sorrentino's brilliantly inventive, wickedly funny stories impart a truth that has the power of divination. Reading The Moon in Its Flight is sheer pleasure.__Walter Abish

Review
“Gilbert Sorrentino's brilliantly inventive, wickedly funny stories impart a truth that has the power of divination. Reading The Moon in Its Flight is sheer pleasure.”—Walter Abish

Book Description
Bearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans thirty-five years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories."Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary."-The New York Times

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bearing His Trademark Balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans thirty-five years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Andrew Santella - The New York Times

A sort of grim nostalgia pervades his stories, many of the best of which are set in a perfectly evoked mid-20th century New York of shabby cocktail lounges and afternoon papers.

Publishers Weekly

This collection of new and old stories from poet and novelist Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew) hews to a self-consciously modernist agenda. Many of the pieces are different versions of a single narrative about adulterous triangles connecting mediocre writers, their sexually voracious wives and their backstabbing business associates, set in a sour New York-San Francisco milieu of beatnik literary wannabes and "deadbeats." The caustic realism of these stories about the falsity of art and love in postwar urban America is accompanied by an ironic meta-commentary on the falsity of literary realism itself, in which Sorrentino bemoans the unreliability of the narrator, advertises his own writerly artifices ("Now I come to the literary part of the story.... I grant you it will be unbelievable") and decries the middlebrow conventions that make such artifice commercially necessary. His own highbrow allegiances are proclaimed in hallucinatory passages composed of the sort of cryptic non sequiturs ("Bossed by one schemer, so slow in sliding along the blue, horizontal mime who had stretched from one hem to the next, an idle guttersnipe bawled in humping a whore whom a pimp's trull had long since sassed") his admirers call "Joycean" for their intense, enigmatic imagery. But underneath Sorrentino's cynical tone and avant-garde stylings, his themes-art corrupted by ambition and commerce, youthful desire corrupted by marriage-reveal him to be a romantic at heart. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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