Stanley Elkin

In a trio of novellas, a wheelchair-bound professor presides over an out-of-control student party, the spurned fiance+a7e of the Prince of England pens her expose+a7 memoirs, and the winner of a foundation grant searches for his scholarly identity among his academic peers.

Narrates forty hours in the life of Bobbo Druff, City Commissioner of Streets, aged fifty-eight whose ordered world becomes suddenly more complicated.

"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 cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else.". "As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it - or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards."--BOOK JACKET.

"Abandoned by his wife and devastated by the death of his twelve-year old son, Eddy Bale becomes obsessed with the plight of terminally ill children and develops a plan to provide a "last hurrah" dream vacation for seven children who will never grow-up. Eddy and his four dyfunctional chaperones journey to the entertainment capital of America - Disney World. Once they arrive, a series of absurdities characteristic of an Elkin novel - including a freak snowstorm and a run-in with a vengeful Mickey Mouse - transform Eddy's idealistic wish into a fantastic nightmare."--BOOK JACKET.

Considered by many to be Elkin's magnum opus, George Mills is, an ambitious, digressive and endlessly entertaining account of the 1,000 year history of the George Millses. From toiling as a stable boy during the crusades to working as a furniture mover, there has always been a George Mills whose lot in life is to serve important personages. But the latest in the line of true blue-collar workers may also be the last, as he obsesses about his family's history and decides to break the cycle of doomed George Millses. An inventive, unique family saga, George Mills is Elkin at his most manic, most comic and most poignant.

Stanley Elkin's short comic novel "The Living End" is a nifty, nasty blast against the Judeo-Christian tradition. By hilariously excoriating the conventional vision of the afterlife, Elkin (1930-1995) uses his fandangoing language to accuse God of cultivating an imagination that's sadistic rather than sublime. Elkin's satiric misanthropy is worthy of Twain, though it falls short of Swift. The action in "The Living End" jumps from Heaven to Hell and back, its sardonic metaphysics revolving around the sufferings of a Job-like figure, Ellerbee, a decent man who while alive makes a few small mistakes, such as keeping his liquor store open on the Sabbath. - Bill Marx on ArtsFuse.org

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.

"Sentenced to a year in jail for providing his customers with everything they needed - drugs for the nervous, abortions for the unintending, guns for the crazed - department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in a Kafkaesque prison. Labeled a "bad man," Feldman is treated as a fool, made to wear a clownish version of his business suit with oversized button holes too big for the buttons and miscut legs and pockets. While incarcerated, he's forced to come to terms with his criminal self - a man always on the make, one who can't avoid overselling to the poor and lying to the trusting - in this grey-stone purgatory run by a sadistic prison warden who enforces a set of elaborate, ever-shifting rules."--Jacket.

Picaresque satire concerning a modern-day Boswell, a strong man, who collects celebrities in order to build up his ego.

Mrs. Ted Bliss has lived on her own in a Miami condominium complex since the death of her husband, a Chicago butcher. All her life defined by her family, by Ted, by her kids, by her "gang" in the snowy Midwest, Mrs. Bliss's ties grow more tenuous with each passing year. But Mrs. Ted is stepping out. She receives the attentions of Alcibiades Chitral from Venezuela, as well as Tommy "Overeasy" Auveristas, and Manny from the building. Why are they all so interested in Ted's Buick LeSabre? Her children begin to worry about her adventures with her new friends foreign and domestic, and recommend a therapist. It is only when Mrs. Bliss runs into the shifty Milton "Junior" Yellin, her husband's former Chicago business partner, that the blush comes back into her cheeks. Mrs. Bliss, never a particularly modern woman, is learning to maneuver; and by the time disaster hits, she has come to terms with her past and the vagaries of her new life.

Collection of essays by the author on various topics from the first amendment to show business.

Screenplay for a film which was never made.

One's ship, by B. Midwood.--In praise of Vespasian, by A. Chester.--Revelation, by F. O'Connor.--In the heart of the heart of the country, by W. H. Gass.--The scream on 57th Street, by H. Calisher.--City boy, by L. Michaels.--The day of trials, by A. Lebowitz.--Dean of men, by P. Taylor.--Mosby's memoirs, by S. Bellow.--Love in the winter, by D. Curley.--The babysitter, by R. Coover.--Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn violin concerto, by B. Targan.--Tell me a riddle, by T. Olsen.--Wife-wooing, by J. Updike.--Menelaiad, by J. Barth.