Product Description

A collection of stories and poems about Elvis features the writing of Alice Walker, Greil Marcus, Nick Cave, Mark Childress, Diane Wakoski, Janice Eidus, Pagan Kennedy, Howard Waldrop, and others. 25,000 first printing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2285402 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Ebersole and Peabody's ( Mondo Barbie ) new collection will be published on Elvis's birthday, January 8. "We'd do the music that Elvis would have done if only the Colonel hadn't put him in all those corny movies," Pagan Kennedy's would-be Elvis impersonator says in one of the less credible pieces. Other far-fetched stories make Presley a figure in today's world; Harold Waldrop turns him into a senator who takes jazz clarinetist Dwight Eisenhower as his ideal. More interesting are period pieces in which Elvis is peripheral: Diane Wakoski's poem about a teenager in a home for unwed mothers circa 1956 and an excerpt from Mark Childress's novel in which a white Southern boy chances upon a black radio station. Some of the finest pieces concern contemporary reactions to the dead idol: the woman in Cathryn Hankla's story searches for her dreamboat using each date's adoration for Elvis as a test; Laura Kalpakian contributes a wonderful excerpt from Graced Land (recently turned into a TV movie starring Roseanne Arnold) about a social worker contemplating her upcoming marriage while calling on a welfare mother who lives and dies for Elvis. Selections vary greatly in quality, but the best pieces make reading well worth the effort.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
From the editors of Mondo Barbie (St. Martin's, 1993) comes another anthology of an icon. Elvis is portrayed in these stories and poems as he was, both in youth and middle age; as he might have been had different paths been taken; and as he always will be in is fans' dreams and fantasies. Here he is a man constrained by fame in Rachel Salazar's evocative "Words and Pictures," a politician on the rise in Howard Waldrop's "Ike at the Mike," and a Hasidic Jew hiding out in the Bronx after faking his death in Janice Eidus's "Elvis, Axl, and Me." Some of the best of these selections are parts of works the Elvis faithful are likely to know; still, they're gathered here to be wrapped in blue suede paper and published January 8, which would be Elvis's 59th birthday. For pop culture collections and Elvis fans everywhere.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L. , Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, is a figure whose image has reached iconic stature. Elvis personified the American dream as he went from being a singer to a celebrity to a legend. The fiction and poetry in this anthology attest to the legend's broad and varied appeal. It includes accounts of pilgrimages to Graceland, teenage fantasies about dates who behave like Elvis in his movies, and Elvis spottings, among them one in which the narrator discovers Elvis disguised as a Hasidic Jew in a deli on the Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. Several stories flirt with religious connections: in Rafael Alvarez's "Annunciation," a young Jewish virgin conceives the restless spirit of Elvis while floating above Baltimore in a hot air balloon, while in Michael Wilkerson's "Elvis Cults," obsession becomes bizarrerie complete with plastic surgery to become a look-alike and a plot to have states which Elvis cults dominate secede. Mondo Elvis is a largely hilarious romp through the dreams, hopes, and fears generated by a star whose fans refuse to let him die. Lindsay Throm