Stanley Elkin Books In Order

Novels

  1. Boswell (1964)
  2. A Bad Man (1968)
  3. The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
  4. The Making of Ashenden (1972)
  5. Alex and the Gypsy (1976)
  6. The Franchiser (1976)
  7. The Living End (1979)
  8. George Mills (1982)
  9. The Magic Kingdom (1985)
  10. The Rabbi of Lud (1987)
  11. The Six Year-Old Man (1988)
  12. The MacGuffin (1991)
  13. Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995)

Collections

  1. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1967)
  2. Eligible Men (1974)
  3. Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits (1980)
  4. Early Elkin (1985)
  5. Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1993)

Non fiction

  1. Pieces of Soap (1992)

Novels Book Covers

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Stanley Elkin Books Overview

Boswell

Fiction. Boswell is Stanley Elkin’s first and funniest novel: the comic odyssey of a twentieth century groupie who collects celebrities as his insurance policy against death. James Boswell strong man, professional wrestler his most heroic match is with the Angel of Death is a con man, a gate crasher, and a moocher of epic talent. He is also the ‘hero of one of the most original novel in years’ Oakland Tribune a man on the make for all the great men of his time his logic being that if you can’t be a lion, know a pride of them. Can he cheat his way out of mortality? ‘No serious funny writer in this country can match him’ New York Times Book Review.

A Bad Man

Breaking the law in a foolhardy attempt to accommodate his customers, unscrupulous department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in jail and at the mercy of the warden, who tries to break Leo of his determination to stay bad. NYT.

The Dick Gibson Show

Look who’s on the ‘Dick Gibson Radio Show’: Arnold the Memory Expert ‘I’ve memorized the entire West Coast shoreline except for cloud cover and fog banks’. Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine year old orphan millionaire, terrified of being adopted. The woman whose life revolves around pierced lobes. An evil hypnotist. Swindlers. Con men. And Dick Gibson himself. Anticipating talk radio and its crazed hosts, Stanley Elkin creates a brilliant comic world held together by American manias and maniacs in all their forms, and a character who perfectly understands what Americans want and gives it to them.

The Franchiser

Ben Flesh inherits an unusual deathbed request: the prime interest rate. This wildly comic, energetic, and virtuoso novel surveys the sordid American scene with an eye that reflects the chaos of our society with a brilliance and clarity seldom encountered. As William Gass writes in his foreword, ‘Elkin composes a song from the clutter of the country, a chant out of that ‘cargo of crap’ that comprises our culture…
.’This is vintage Elkin, America made Flesh through a hero who can’t see the forest for the picnic tables and through a tale whose central metaphor is the franchise, that self replicating mechanism that has sanitized and saturated our landscape.

The Living End

Killed during a senseless holdup, kindhearted Ellerbee finds himself on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme park Heaven and inner city Hell, where he learns the truth about God’s love and wrath. NYT.

George Mills

An ambitious digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the thousand year history of the George Millses George Mills is the antithesis to the typical Horatio Alger story. Since the First Crusade there has always been a George Mills who despite his best efforts is unable to improve his position in life or that of his descendants. Instead all the George Millses are forced to accept their lot as true blue collar workers serving important personages in a series of odd jobs ranging from horse talker in a salt mine to working as a furniture mover in contemporary St. Louis. But the latest in the long line of George Millses may also be the last as he obsesses about his family’s history and determines that he will be the one to break this doomed cycle of servitude.

The Magic Kingdom

Brim*ming with Elkin’s comic brilliance and singular wordplay, The Magic Kingdom tells the story of Eddy Bale, who, determined to learn from the ghastly experience of his son’s long, drawn out death, decides to raise enough money to take seven terminally ill children to Disney World in order to give them a dream vacation before they die. Stanley Elkin, a two timer winner of the National Book Critics Award and three time nominee for the National Book Award, is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of the contemporary period. Author of over a dozen novels and short story collections, his works include The Franchiser, George Mills, and Mrs. Ted Bliss. First published by Dutton 1985, most recent paperback by Thunder’s Mouth 1991.

The Rabbi of Lud

Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn resides in Lud, New Jersey, where Jews from the surrounding states come to bury their dead. Distressed by the lack of living children in the area, the Rabbi’s daughter Connie creates a scandal that livens up the town of Lud when she testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary.

The MacGuffin

Bobbo Druff, a coca leaf chewing street commissioner ‘on the cusp of just past it, ‘ transforms his mid life crisis into a paranoid web of mysterious events in a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock.

Mrs. Ted Bliss

In language that is ‘rich, musical and playful, like that of a Joyce who grew up on Yiddish’ Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Stanley Elkin offers us the extraordinary Dorothy Bliss, an eighty two year old widow caught in a tragicomic world, forced to find purpose in endless card games and ‘Good Neighbor Policy Night’ at a Florida retirement community.

Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

‘This imagination of Elkin’s sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny.’ The New York Times These nine stories reveal a dazzling variety of styles, tones and subject matter. Among them are some of Stanley Elkin’s finest, including the fabulistic ‘On a Field, Rampant,’ the farcical ‘Perlmutter at the East Pole,’ and the stylized ‘A Poetics for Bullies.’ Despite the diversity of their form and matter, each of these stories shares Elkin’s nimble, comic, antic imagination, a dedication to the value of form and language, and a concern with a single theme: the tragic inadequacy of a simplistic response to life.

Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits

Collects the most amusing and perceptive passages from the acclaimed comic’s previous books, including selections from The Dick Gibson Show, The Franchiser, and The Living End which reveal the humorous side of American life.

Van Gogh’s Room at Arles

These three delicious novellas, from ‘a master of language and black humor’ New York Times, demonstrate the author’s mastery of the roller cosater sentence, hair pin narrative twist, and the joke that leaves readers torn between tears and laughter.

Pieces of Soap

With a wickedly witty touch, this collection of essays takes readers on a tour of American life in the 20th century. Exploring byways from Hollywood to Fifth Avenue, award winning author Stanley Elkin contemplates such matters as show business and high literature, first sexual experiences and First Amendment controversies, and even the moral implications of stealing soap.

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