Seventy-Eight Years Ago Today

Stanley Elkin, my favorite novelist, was born.

I've written this before, but the most beautiful moment in any novel I've read is in Magic Kingdom:

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

Read Bad Man, read all the novellas in Searches and Seizures, read The Franchiser and Dick Gibson and George Mills and Mrs Ted Bliss, read them all if you can, but you must read Magic Kingdom, the bravest, most generously and fiercely human novel I've ever read.