The Dick Gibson Show

The Dick Gibson Show

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By Stanley Elkin
Introduction by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

ISBN: 9781564781987

Publication Date: 12/1/1998

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.

“Stanley Elkin’s third novel, The Dick Gibson Show...squeezes the blackheads behind the ears of your imagination... It’s among the most powerful and funny American novels I know... This book is a landslide of language, and it’s unfair, somehow, that so many gifts were bestowed on one writer." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"This is Elkin's third novel and his best--a funny, melancholy, frightening, scabrous, absolutely American compendium that may turn out to be our classics about radio." —Joseph McElroy, The New York Times Book Review

"Stanley Elkin's imagination should be declared a national landmark." —Paul Auster

"Elkin is one of America's great tragicomic geniuses." —Robert Coover

Stanley Elkin, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, was the author of several novels and short-story collections, including BoswellA Bad ManSearches and SeizuresThe Living EndThe FranchiserGeorge MillsThe MacGuffinVan Gogh's Room at Arles, and Mrs. Ted Bliss.