Bøger af Stanley Elkin

Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

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. First published by Random House (1982), most recent paperback by Avon (1996).

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, 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?

Fiction. A reprint of the fifth of Stanley Elkin's 17 published works, originally published in 1970, this novel anticipates talk radio and its crazed hosts. Characters include Arnold the Memory Expert, Bernie Perk the burning pharmacist, Henry Harper the 9-year-old orphan millionaire, a woman obsessed by pierced ears, an evil hypnotist, various con men and swindlers and Dick Gibson himself, a character who understands exactly what Americans want and gives it to them. "Stanley Elkin's imagination should be declared a national landmark" (Paul Auster).

A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings-until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme-park Heaven and inner-city Hell-to learn, along with his late coworkers and a marvelously vivid cast of characters, that much of what they've always heard about God's love, God's wrath, and the afterlife is, unfortunately, quite true.