How long does it take to read Mulligan Stew?
Gilbert Sorrentino
Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino takes about 8 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 11 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1979. 446 pages, about 122,650 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 38 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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 Hammett) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative.
Subjects: Novelists, Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.), Fiction, Authorship, Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), Fiction, humorous, general
