Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers - American Literature by Stanley Elkin Paperback

About the Book

"This imagination of Elkin's sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny." The New York Times

Book Synopsis

These nine stories reveal a dazzling variety of styles, tones and subject matter. Among them are some of Stanley Elkin's finest, including the fabulistic "On a Field, Rampant," the farcical "Perlmutter at the East Pole," and the stylized "A Poetics for Bullies." Despite the diversity of their form and matter, each of these stories shares Elkin's nimble, comic, antic imagination, a dedication to the value of form and language, and a concern with a single theme: the tragic inadequacy of a simplistic response to life.

Review Quotes

Stanley Elkin is one of the bigs of American comic fiction, which puts him in a small room with wonderful company. His work is funny and moral and wildly adventurous, and this early rambunctious collection will please admirers of The Dick Gibson Show and The Living End. --Garrison Keillor

A master storyteller of formidable imagination and stunning insight. His stories sparkle.

I've spent days reading (and rereading) these superb stories. There are indeed some giants in the English language, and I now count Elkin among them.

Stanley Elkin has a remarkable talent, composed of many important virtues: originality, wit, insight, an unusually sharp eye for irony, verbal exuberance, precision, detachment. I did not read one of his nine stories without absorption, even renewed expectation.

These nine stories have no missteps, nothing that does not contribute to the artfulness of the storytelling.

Virtually any story in this collection contains more art than 98% of the thousands of novels published in this country in the past five years. Elkin's stories are fully realized expressions of the comic sense of tragedy.