The Dick Gibson Show - (American Literature) by Stanley Elkin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

"A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language."-- "John Irving"

"Stanley Elkin's third novel, The Dick Gibson Show...squeezes the blackheads behind the ears of your imagination; it's a Diane Arbus walk on the unreconciled side. It's among the most powerful and funny American novels I know....it's worth noting how fully this novel, which is set mostly in the two decades after World War II, anticipates the daily purge that is the internet, its mille-feuille layers of outrage and heartbreak....The contents of Elkin's novel leave you a bit sick. His talent leaves you wasted, too. This book is a landslide of language, and it's unfair, somehow, that so many gifts were bestowed on one writer..."--Dwight Garner "New York Times, American Beauties column"

"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 "New York Times Book Review"