SOURCE: A review of Mrs. Ted Bliss, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 69, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 150-53.

[In the following highly positive review, Milofsky prefaces his comments on Mrs. Ted Bliss with a brief tribute to Elkin's life and works.]

The king is dead—and I don't mean Elvis. Stanley Elkin, arguably the most wildly imaginative fiction writer of the post-war generation, passed from this planet May 31 and literature is poorer for it. To the end, however, Stanley had his laugh as the New York Times obit was shot through with inaccuracies, starting with the cause of death. "We told them Daddy died of heart failure," Elkin's daughter Molly said, "because only drunks die of pancreatitis. My father did a lot of things, but he was no drunk." Our newspaper of record also got Stanley's place of birth wrong ("Brooklyn," his wife Joan remarked. "Give me a break."), and the...