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A bad man

Stanley Elkin

1967308 pagesabout 5–7 hours
1967
first published
  • 1967Random House · 336 pages · ENG
  • 2003Dalkey Archive Press · 308 pages · ENGISBN 9781564783325
  • 1996Harper Perennial · 308 pages · ENGISBN 9780380728985
  • 1981Warner Books · 368 pages · ENGISBN 9780446955393
  • 1984PlumeISBN 9780525481324

"Sentenced to a year in jail for providing his customers with everything they needed - drugs for the nervous, abortions for the unintending, guns for the crazed - department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in a Kafkaesque prison. Labeled a "bad man," Feldman is treated as a fool, made to wear a clownish version of his business suit with oversized button holes too big for the buttons and miscut legs and pockets. While incarcerated, he's forced to come to terms with his criminal self - a man always on the make, one who can't avoid overselling to the poor and lying to the trusting - in this grey-stone purgatory run by a sadistic prison warden who enforces a set of elaborate, ever-shifting rules."--Jacket.

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