A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this brilliant novel masterfully dissects the art world's culture of corruption and compromise, and in so doing examines the social and political malaise that continues to have a grip on modern America. One of Gilbert Sorrentino's most engaging novels, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is often named among the most important novels of the last several decades.