Season Twenty of the Two Month Review: “Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino

As mentioned in this Reading the Dalkey Archive post, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino is going to be the next book featured on the Two Month Review podcast.

For anyone new to this podcast, episodes drop weekly—recorded live on YouTube, then disseminated as a traditional podcast through Apple, Spotify, etc.—and feature Chad W. Post (founder and publisher of Open Letter Books, editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press) and Brian Wood (author of Joytime Killbox), with occasional guests, breaking down a long book section by section, reading slowly to be able to unpack these so-called “difficult” books, providing entryways into these texts—all while trying to make each other laugh and demonstrate that books, that reading complicated fiction, can be quite pleasurable.

So, if this is your first time joining along, all you need to do is subscribe to the YouTube channel and/or the podcast feed (Apple, Spotify), read along, sit back, and enjoy. If you want to participate, you can share your thoughts, comments, and questions during the live YouTube recording, or email us directly at chad.post [at] rochester edu.

Again, here’s a personal explanation of why you should read Mulligan Stew, but if that’s not convincing—or concrete enough, plot-wise—here’s the jacket copy:

Widely regarded as Sorrentino’s finest achievement, 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 Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.

On the schedule below, you’ll find the page numbers for the NEW edition, and for the OLD Dalkey Archive/Grove Press printings. It’s not important which one you use, but the page numbers are slightly different for the two editions, so if you’re reading along, you’ll want to pay attention. (Pages from the new, Dalkey Essentials edition, are listed first, page numbers from the earlier editions are in parentheses.)

September 7: Front Matter-66 (Front Matter-55): YouTube link

September 21: 67-148 (56-124)

September 28: 149-196 (125-164)

October 5: 197-261 (164-221)

October 12: 262-327 (222-277)

October 26: 328-395 (278-336)

November 2: 396-455 (337-388)

November 9: 456-End (389-End)

The dates above are the expected dates for the live YouTube recording (the podcast version comes out a day later), but we sometimes have to shift the date based on the schedules of the hosts and guests. So follow Two Month Review, Chad W. Post, and Open Letter on Twitter/X for additional information.

Mulligan Stew is available at better bookstores everywhere, from Dalkey Archive directly, from Bookshop.org, and from wherever you get your books.