Pieces of Soap: Essays - Softcover

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

A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language.

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

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

Elkin is one of America's great tragicomic geniuses.

Stanley Elkin was one of our great American writers. “Adivine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language,” as JohnIrving put it, and nowhere is that more clear than this collection of essays,which find Elkin wresting hilarity and heartbreak from the most unlikely ofsources.