In Searches & Seizures, Elkin tells the story of the criminal, the lovelorn, and the grieving, each searching desperately for fulfillment, while on the verge of receiving much more than they bargained for. Infused with Elkin's signature wit and richly drawn characters, The Bailbondsman, The Makin...
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.
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, gate crasher, ...
Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding ci...
It is hard to be too disparaging about this novel, seeing Stanley Elkin wrote it in the last few years of his life, probably in the fleeting moments when his crippling multiple sclerosis let up long enough so he could type or handwrite. It is an heroic act that in his last years he chose to power...
This is a collection of three short stories, and I have provided both reviews and excerpts of each.Book One—Her Sense of TimingThis book begins with the protagonist’s wife leaving him—literally in the opening lines. We learn of her calm demeanor (she kisses his cheek and cheerfully says goodbye o...
Every novel of reputed worth, no matter how much I may or may not like it, has something of merit to recommend it. The pleasures I derived from this one, however, were woefully out of proportion to the time I spent with it.Thirty years ago I had read "The Dick Gibson Show", and nothing except dis...
The MacGuffin started off strong, but somewhere along the way either he or I, or maybe both of us, got a little tired of the story and lost interest. I thought this might be a failing of the book, but I'm thinking now that it might have been an (un)intentional literary device. I won't explain t...
The best satire is beautifully written (thus, consign almost all 'satire' to the garbage can); it can be enjoyed by people who disagree with the author on large matters (a religious person should enjoy The Living End, because they will agree on the smaller absurdities that Elkin deals with so wel...
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...
The message was clear enough. He was needed in Riverdale, they said. To call, even to ask what was wrong, could be read as extenuation, a sort of plea bargaining. It had been their arrangement—his, the twins’ and triplets’—to serve, forever to come through, simply to be there when the chips were ...
Schiff told Claire, “is you’ve got a hell of a sense of timing, a hell of a sense of timing. You’ve got a sense of timing on you like last year’s calendar.” “Timing, Jack? Timing? Timing has nothing to do with it. Time maybe, that it’s run out. This has been coming for years.” “You might have tol...
I had become someone to whom several things could happen at once. It was a shock to realize that the willingness to live complexly—doubly, trebly—to throw open one’s windows to all weathers, was the ordinary experience of most men. Yielding to one human ritual is yielding to all. It is like being...
Preminger said, “that’s what I want.” “That the grandkids come for a visit they don’t scream in the halls and run the elevator all day up and down so you can’t get it when you need it.” “Of course.” “That the bricks don’t come down on our heads when we walk by outside.” “Yes.” “That people park o...
They’d been to Main Street, U.S.A. They’d been to Liberty Square, Adventureland, and Fantasyland. They’d been to Tomorrowland and to Frontierland and by now were tired of Benny’s dark joke. “‘From whose bourne no traveler returns,’” he would say whenever the last two sections of the theme park we...