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. "Most of Elkin's prose is alive, with its wealth of detail and specifically American metaphors, and the surreal elements in the narrative are tightly controlled," said LJ's reviewer of this odd novel (LJ 6/1/71), which concerns the host and guests of a late-night radio call-in show. Though no doubt tame compared to the daily insanity of the Jerry Springer show, this remains "compulsively readable." Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. “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 "A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language." ― John Irving "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 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 (1930-1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches and Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh's Room at Arles , was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. From Part 1: Vita; Dick's Log: When he had made his entry he was momentarily distracted by the low sounds coming out of the speaker mounted above his desk. The music was still playing, but he thought he detected a shift, a sudden soprano sharpness in the mix. He looked nervously at the dials but saw that all the needles still treaded easily in the safe middle depths of their dial faces. He turned up the volume on the speaker and listened. He had a sensitive ear, for the sound of radio some sort of unmusical perfect pitch, and he was certain that the tone quality had changed. Yet the dials, he consulted again, registered nothing wrong; as blandly steady as some Greenwich constant, they signified an almost textbook energy. He turned off his radio and tilted his head judiciously toward the sounds that came from the speaker. He looked at the telephone that connected him on a direct line to his station, certain it would ring. Checking the dials a third time--the sound had thickened now, exactly, it occurred to him, like the signal of a station just before it fades--he decided that the trouble must be in the transcription itself. He picked up the phone. The studio engineer was already on it. "What's going on?" the man asked. "It's got to be the transcription. The dials show I'm putting out everything I'm receiving. Get Markham to make an announcement." "Markham's out," the engineer told him. "The transcription was supposed to run for a half hour. I'm the only one here." "Well, put on something else. It sounds awful." "I know. Look, use the standby mike. I'll cut you in f