Nonpareil Books, Third Edition, 1988. Fade marks to spine, otherwise good secondhand.

Three novellas by the marvelous black-comic author of Boswell, The Dick Gibson Show, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. Each in its own way is an enticing mythic encounter in which the hero creates his own dragon from modem society — a bailbondsman playing detective (and god) with a faithful employee (and murderer); a wealthy idealist who tries to purify himself for the love of a dying virgin only to end up making love to a bear in a three-dimensional art landscape; a 37 year-old virgin has-been lecturer who becomes a symbolic Oedipal failure as he falls to live out his father's existence in a nice Jewish condominium in Chicago. Elkin makes the unspeakable funny (two old people consciously preparing their "death beds," a lifeguard who discourses rationally on his mental breakdown preparatory to jumping off his balcony) both by a deliberately acute ear ("I am the earth, water, fire, and air heir") and an absolutely clear avoidance of conventional responses to our sacred concepts of death, fun, sex, money, and sanity. These are darkly hilarious tales about the encounter with the black void: a highly crafted intelligent book for intelligent, verbally attuned readers for whom the baroque is but a heightened way of approaching reality.