Pieces of Soap

With a wickedly witty touch, Elkin’s essays takes readers on a tour of American life in the 20th century.

Stanley Elkin was one of our great American writers. “A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language,” as John Irving put it, and nowhere is that more clear than this collection of essays, which find Elkin wresting hilarity and heartbreak from the most unlikely of sources.  Weird and spirited . . . the constant running through Elkin’s essays is the thrill they convey of a writer actually thinking—fresh—on the page. —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

Elkin's inimitable language is an exuberant blend of high allusions and colloquial registers, as bounce-and-pop and it is stop-and-go. His sentences can contain, on the same page, wonderful one-off puns (he refers to remainder shelves as "has bins") and a stretch of boisterous brilliance . . . . you'll leave satisfied and completely stuffed. —The New York Times Book Review

Stanley Elkin is no ordinary genius of language, laughter, and the irresistible American idiom; he is an ingenious genius—an inimitable sword swallower, fire-eater, and three-ring circus of fecund wit and inexhaustible comic artistry. —Cynthia Ozick

Mr. Elkin's world is a wonderland of language. No writer commands words more artfully than Mr. Elkin at his best. No one else bends English into such fantastic and fanciful shapes or wrests such comedy from such unlikely material. —The Wall Street Journal

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

Brilliant . . .His sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and gather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop. —The New York Times

Not since James Joyce, perhaps, has there been a better serious funny writer than Stanley Elkin . . .a dazzling master of language.—Publishers Weekly

It's raw energy that Elkin loves . . . He's Ahab smashing through the mask with jokes. Grizzly reality is his straight man.—John Gardner

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

How does Stanley Elkin make magic, book after book?Well, sentence after sentence, word after word, is how. He is an irreplaceable treasure.—Geoffrey Wolff

Pushing the envelope has always been Stanley Elkin's stock-in-trade . . . . If we didn't have him to read, we'd need to invent him. But we couldn't come close. —Richard Ford

Stanley Elkin’s writing is often memorably absurdist and can be disarmingly funny, even as it deals with offbeat and sometimes harrowing subjects. —Tobias Carroll, Signature ReadsStanley Elkin (1930-1995) was an award-winning novelist, storywriter, and essayist. He lived in St. Louis, MO.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and The Fun Parts and three novels: The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.