You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

My guest today is Gilbert Sorrentino, and we're talking to him up in his home in Stanford,

California. I think of him as being a retiring generator of these remarkable machine-tooled texts.

He won't come down here to Los Angeles to read or to talk to me.

And yet from the Dawkey Archive Press now, every few months, nearly every year, I guess,

but with republications, we have his Under the Shadow, his completion of his trilogy, Mysterio,

along with Rose Theater, an odd number. I guess this all started with the imaginative qualities

of actual things and his incredible book of Rambo-inspired prose poems, Splendid Hotel.

But I think that Gilbert Sorrentino is with this novel under the shadow, the unquestionable

inventor of a strange and savage kind of novel.

Very funny, very mysterious.

And I guess I'll begin by asking you, Gil,

about this new series of tableaus.

What was the origin of Under the Shadow?

Under the Shadow is derived from a series of drawings that were made for Raymond

Rousselle's final book, New Impressions of Africa.

The history of these drawings is rather interesting indeed, and I had been looking at these drawings for, oh, I would say, a good five or six years

in the Pauver edition, in which all the drawings are grouped together at the back of the book.

There were 59 of them.

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