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 Boswell, A Bad Man, Searches and Seizures, The Living End, The Franchiser, George Mills, The MacGuffin, Van Gogh's Room at Arles, and Mrs. Ted Bliss.