Curtis White

Stanley Elkin

"A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Mr. Ellerbee - until he is senselessly killed during a liquor-store holdup - is a good husband, a good boss, and an overall good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings. After a whirlwind tour of the afterlife, Ellerbee finds himself in Hell for a litany of minor offenses, including taking the Lord's name in vain, keeping his store open on the Sabbath, and thinking that Heaven looks like a theme park. And so begins Elkin's hilarious, imaginative vision of life after death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Living End

"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." -- Back cover.

Mrs. Ted Bliss

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.

A Bad Man

National Book Award finalist: 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 Dick Gibson Show

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.

The Magic Kingdom

Three novellas filled with humor and insight by one of America's modern literary masters.

Three Novellas

Searches & Seizures

"Sentence for sentence, nobody in America writes better than Stanley Elkin." The New Republic

A Novel

The Franchiser

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, and moocher of epic talent. He is also 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 morality?

A Modern Comedy

Boswell

The magic king is bored living in his kingdom all by himself, and decides to create a queen and subjects to keep him entertained

Stanley Elkin's the Magic Kingdom

Magic Kingdom

"This imagination of Elkin's sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny." The New York Times

Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

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.

George Mills

DIV DIVDIVA small-town Rabbi’s quiet life is turned upside down when his only daughter drops a bombshell/divDIV /div/divDIVThe only long-term occupants of Lud, New Jersey, reside in its cemeteries,a fact that suits Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn just fine. Never particularly passionate about his religious calling, Rabbi Goldkorn spends his days officiating funerals and burying the dead in the local cemetery. His life is simple by design—until one day his daughter’s scandalous rebellion threatens to send his world spinning wildly out of control./divDIV /divDIVSpiked with Elkin’s characteristic wit, The Rabbi of Lud is a poignant satire of religious culture—and the story of one man’s struggle with morality, mortality, and the meaning of life./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis./div /div

The Rabbi of Lud

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.

Stories from the Sixties

The unlikely becomes the commonplace in this tale about a man who knows everything about his family, going back a thousand years

"A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Mr. Ellerbee - until he is senselessly killed during a liquor-store holdup - is a good husband, a good boss, and an overall good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings. After a whirlwind tour of the afterlife, Ellerbee finds himself in Hell for a litany of minor offenses, including taking the Lord's name in vain, keeping his store open on the Sabbath, and thinking that Heaven looks like a theme park. And so begins Elkin's hilarious, imaginative vision of life after death."--BOOK JACKET.

Early Elkin

Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits

Screenplay for a film which was never made.

Stanley Elkin

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