Join Amazon Prime and get unlimited Free One-Day Delivery. Already a member? Sign in.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
25 used & new from £2.29

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Tell a Friend
Red the Fiend (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
 
 
Red the Fiend (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) (Paperback)
by Gilbert Sorrentino (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  (1 customer review)
RRP: £7.99
Price: £6.39 & eligible for Free UK delivery on orders over £15 with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £1.60 (20%)
Availability: In stock. Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want guaranteed delivery by 1pm Friday, August 22? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

25 used & new available from £2.29

Product details

  • Paperback: 213 pages
  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; First Paperback edition (15 Dec 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1564784525
  • ISBN-13: 978-1564784520
  • Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,104,130 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #7 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > S > Sorrentino, Gilbert

    (Publishers and authors: Improve Your Sales)

Product Description

Review
Red the Fiend is a discomfiting masterpiece, once read impossible to forget or shake off. --Gerald Howard, Bookforum

Gilbert Sorrentino has been writing some of our best fiction for close to thirty years, and Red the Fiend is no exception. . . . Elegantly cynical, beautifully comic, typical of this masterful writer, Red the Fiend is a brilliant achievement. --Toby Olson

Product Description
A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and widen to reflect the hardships of Depression-era life.

See all Product Description

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tag this product

 ( What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
Search Products Tagged with
 

 

Customer Reviews

1 Review
5 star:    (0)
4 star: 100%  (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
4.0 out of 5 stars Sorrentino wallops The Waltons, 11 Aug 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Red the Fiend (Hardcover)
This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?