Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits

by Stanley Elkin

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

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

290 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Stanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.

During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot.

His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip."

About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."

Reviews

[Samson LeFerg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to Elkin (or so I assume: it's the only Elkin I've read).

I docked a star because the book is so odd a compendium of stories, novellas and novel excerpts that I didn't know where to go after I'd finished reading: buy Boswell and finish the doomed wrestler's tale? Complete The Living End? Read Ashenden's companion novellas in Searches and Seizures? Read them all and become an Elkin completist?!

It's a paralysis-through-plenty type scenario, and I gotta say it's not a bad problem to have.

[Scott Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eclectic collection of stories from a prose master. While I didn't find Elkin's stories as funny as the blurbs on the book led me to believe, there were plenty of surprises in these pages that left me stunned and agape. The novella that kicks off the collection, "The Making of Ashenden," is especially jaw-dropping and memorable. Other stories suffer a bit from being dated or, sometimes, head-scratchingly unfocused. If you like stories that push the envelope of societal norms, then this collection is for you.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Excepts from his other books. Really you won't need his Greatest Hits -- all of his hits are greatest and unless you really need the Robert Coover Foreword here you should just move on to something anything Elkin. He's great.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

,,"est Hits", to correct the title.