Golk Paperback / softback

by Richard Stern

Part of the Phoenix Fiction Series PF series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

In midcentury America, the golden age of television, a man named Golk is wreaking havoc with the medium.

Through a devastating series of exposuresâ€”"You're on Camera"â€”Golk manipulates the high and mighty, the lowdown and dirty, and the outrageous weird; all are within the compass of Richard Stern in this early novel, a comedy with as many inspired maneuvers as its rambunctious protagonist has for taking the measure of a profligate world. "Golk is a rich and marvelously detailed novel by a man with a cultivated intelligence; it is also the first really good book I have read about television."â€”Norman Mailer "An original: sharp, funny, intelligent, rare. . . . Working in a clean, oblique style reminiscent of Nathanael West, Mr. Stern has written in Golk a first-rate comic novel, a piece of fiction that is at once about and loaded with that kind of recognition that junkies call the flash."â€”Joan Didion, National Review "Golk is fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without weariness.

Best of all Golk is pureâ€”that is to say necessary.

Without hokum."â€”Saul Bellow "Golk (like Golk himself) is a wonderous conception.

Its world responds to personification, not analysis, and personify it Mr. Stern has done. A book in a thousand."â€”Hugh Kenner "What I like about Mr. Stern's fantasy is that it has been conceived and written with so much gaiety.

Far from a political melodrama, it reminds me of a RenÃ© Clair movie, and even the surrealist touches needed to bring out the power and pretense of the television industry are funny rather than symbolically grim."â€”Alfred Kazin, Reporter "A mighty good book, altogether alive, full of beans and none of them spilled."â€”Flannery O'Connor