Compared glowingly with the work of such literary masters as Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, and S.J. Perelman, the fiction of Stanley Elkin defies easy description or categorization - even as it defines literature at its most challenging and rewarding. No less estimable contemporary talents than John Irving, Robert Coover, John Gardner, and Richard Ford have rhapsodized - with both reverence and relish - over Elkin's dazzling originality of theme and spellbinding, playful command of language. A wheelchair-bound professor is abandoned by his wife at the worst possible time, leaving him to preside - helplessly - over a party for his students that is careening out of control ... The spurned fiancee of the Prince of England pens her furious memoirs for public consumption in a series of outrageous tabloid exposes ... And in the title work, a man awarded a foundation grant searches for his scholarly identity in a land of academic giants. Van Gogh's Room at Arles finds the profound and prodigiously creative Stanley Elkin at the peak of his powers, with three astonishing novellas that throw off wit and wisdom like sparks from the grindstone of their author's imagination.