The Stanley Elkin Power Rankings

I can’t come up with a better opening to what I plan on writing below than to say that everything that follows is likely to be pretty silly. Very silly.

I mean, “Power Rankings” are inherently silly. No matter how you dress it up, it’s just another listicle, and listicles are all silly. And one that tries to magic up some sort of mathematical gumbo in order to pretend I’ve created a quasi-objective basis to evaluate and rank Staley Elkin’s books, is truly absurd, especially since my only motivation for doing this is to get Adam Levin to podcast with me because I want to talk to him about Mount Chicago, his most recent novel

I got a signed copy of Mount Chicago a few years back from Exile in Bookville (top 10 store nationwide) during an event for Juan Goméz Bárcena and Katie Whittemore’s Not Even the Dead (top 10 all-time Open Letter title?). Adam was there with his wife, Camille Bordas—whose How to Behave in a Crowd was also available, also signed, and which I also got and just bookmarked to start reading tonight—and we all hung out and hit it off. I saw them again, some months later at a Pilar Adón event at Exile, and same thing—exuberant, invigorating book conversation and a lot of laughs.

All of which led to Adam writing an incredible introduction to the Dalkey Archive Press Essentials edition of The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin. You’ll have to buy the book to get the full thing, but here’s the opening to give you a taste:

The trouble with introducing The Franchiser in 2025 isn’t just that doing so is, as says William H. Gass in his introduction from 1980, “the act of an upstart, an interloper, an interventionist,” but that William H. Gass, back in 1980, already wrote a perfect introduction to The Franchiser. As close to perfect an introduction, at least, as one could possibly hope to encounter.

I say so as someone who doesn’t often read introductions to novels; as someone who, when he does read an introduction to a novel, only ever reads it after having read the novel that the introduction introduces. As a reader, I fear the spoiler, reader. As an introducer, I fear it far more. Far more, even, than seeming like an upstart.

I’ve met plenty of people who believe the fear of spoilers