"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"
