Pieces of Soap (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

While not exactly neglected, Stanley Elkin is certainly one of contemporary American literature’s most undeservedly underread writers—something of an underutilized, underexplored national resource. As celebratory, garrulous, and verbally democratic as Walt Whitman, Elkin sounds his postmodern barbaric yawp over the rooftops in a form that is (as Whitman’s once was) utterly new and decidedly American in its rhythms, materials, accents. But unlike Whitman, who worried that the aches and pains of creeping mortality might “filter in my daily songs,” Elkin, no less the cataloguer...

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