#49

Stanley Elkin is a laugh-riot, dark, sardonic, and endlessly inventive. More people should read his stuff.

Leo Feldman is imprisoned for helping customers at his department store fulfill their desires--any of their desires--out of a basement office. He's rich and influential, so his sentence is only one year. Feldman has always treated life as a game and his associates as pawns; now he's the pawn in a sinister game designed by Warden Fisher. Will Leo figure out the rules of this game in time?

[Though I loved the book, I was aggravated by the NUMEROUS typos in this Dalkey Archive edition. Very distracting to see words like "throughtful" every ten pages or so.]