The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

Overview

 

A municipal employee sets out to unravel a murder—and save himself from the split personality that is pushing him to the brink At age fifty-eight, Robert Druff’s destructive alter ego has begun to take over his life. Frustrated with his job as Commissioner of the Streets and desperate to protect his aura of power, Druff injects himself into the middle of a conspiracy revolving around the death of his son’s girlfriend—and everyone, from his employees to his mistress, seems to be complicit in the plot. Deeply humorous and engaging, The MacGuffin is a striking exploration of obsession and the imaginative story of a man struggling against his own frailty to regain control of his life. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781453204443
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	10/26/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	283
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Ozick

"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. A bountiful novel about the mind of a most uncommon City Commissioner of Streets, The MacGuffin flies through the air with the greatest ease while keeping a quizzical eye open for every spiritual pothole, psychological traffic snarl, and stuck cultural stoplight."

G Wolfe

"I find I've underlined The MacGuffin like a schoolkid, relishing the astonishments. How does Stanley Elkin make magic, book after book? Well, sentence after sentence, word after word, is how. By an unappeasable curiosity about the country's and the heart's works is how. He performs his singular alchemy on cliches of idiom and the spirit, translating what was shopworn into what becomes, by his magic, renewed, freshly true. He is an irreplaceable treasure, as anyone knows who has read him."

Editorial Reviews

In The MacGuffin, that mad Joycean poetry is still there. . . . The sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and lather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop. . . . Elkin is brilliant.
Lorrie Moore, New York Times, 3/10/91

Lorrie Moore

Elkin is one of the grand originals of American fiction--as death haunted as Samuel Beckett, as funny as S. J. Perelman. . . . Elkin simply cannot bear to produce a lifeless sentence . . . The MacGuffin is wonderfully funny. . . . Most readers will want to say, again and again, "Mr. Elkin, sir, you are one hell of a writer,'"
Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 3/10/91

Michael Dirda

By now it shouldn't be necessary to insist on the importance of [Elkin's] work: a list of the American novelists who have mattered over the last three decades would be a pitifully short one if it left him off. . . . He is a sublimely funny writer, an inspired stand-up performer. . . . Druff is gifted, like other Elkin protagonists, with almost miraculous verbal energies. . . . Elkin's whole representation of the American here and now is what deserves most praise. . . . Elkin clearly has just about all of us in mind, and the loving generosity of his wonder of things as they are, and as they might become, is as essentially American as anything in Emerson or Whitman. We owe him thanks again.
Thomas R. Edwards, The New Republic, 5/20/91

Thomas R. Edwards