A Confederacy of Dunces

Author: John Kennedy Toole
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141991437
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'My favourite book of all time... it stays with you long after you have read it - for your whole life, in fact' Billy Connolly A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission - and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with... Never published during his lifetime, John Kennedy Toole's hilarious satire, A Confederacy of Dunces is a Don Quixote for the modern age, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Walker Percy. 'A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities ... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue' The New York Times

Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense

Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141956690
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
The first collected and annotated edition of Carroll's brilliant, witty poems, edited by Gillian Beer. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more. This edition also includes notes, a chronology and an introduction by Gillian Beer that discusses Carroll's love of puzzles and wordplay and the relationship of his poetry with the Alice books 'Opening at random Gillian Beer's new edition of Lewis Carroll's poems, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense, guarantees a pleasurable experience - not all of it nonsensical' - Times Literary Supplement Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898. Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cambridge and past President of Clare Hall College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her works are Darwin's Plots (1983; third edition, 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).

Ken and Thelma

Author: Fletcher, Joel
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455606986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
"Ken has a real gift for mimicry and a refined sense of the absurd . . . the English faculty . . .both fear and court Ken because of his biting comic talent." --from Joel L. Fletcher's journal John Kennedy Toole's first published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, which Walker Percy called a"gargantuan tumultuous human tragi-comedy," became a publishing phenomenon, with almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. The book's outrageous protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, is an icon of contemporary American fiction. Now Ken and Thelma sheds new light on the tragic life story of the author, known as 'Ken' to his friends. Drawing on his own journals and personal letters, Joel L. Fletcher recreates his friendship with Ken in the early 1960s and his long association with Ken's indomitable mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, after the book's publication. Ken and Thelma features personal photographs, many never before published.

Junky

Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802194052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.

Butterfly in the Typewriter

Author: Cory MacLauchlin
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 0306820404
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
The long-awaited biography of John Kennedy Toole ("A Confederacy of Dunces"), whose fascinating life and tragic death is one of the most amazing publishingstories in American literature.

How Many Miles to Babylon?

Author: Jennifer Johnston
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141909439
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
As a child Alec, heir to the big house and only son of a bitter marriage, formed a close friendship with Jerry, a village boy who shared his passion for horses. In 1914 both enlisted in the British Army – Alec goaded by his beautiful, cold mother to fight for King and Country, Jerry to learn his trade for the Irish Nationalist cause. But amid the mud of Flanders, their relationship is tested by an ordeal beyond the horror of the battlefield...

A Cornucopia of Dunderheads

Author: John Kennedy Toole
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692572375
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO IGNATIUS J. REILLY? In this parody of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole, John Kennedy Toole Jr. plunges Ignatius J. Reilly into a New York City winter wonderland, where our Falstaffian hero inadvertently becomes vice president of the Charlie Chan Chinese Fortune Cookie Company, and where he finds a recently unearthed slip of paper that contains an occult secret for overthrowing the governments of the world (in a most unusual way, of course). Ignatius's parodic adventures would not be complete without his nemesis-friend, Myrna Minkoff. Add to the mix her parents, Mr. Minkoff and Mrs. Minkoff, two inept government agents (is there a redundancy here?), Ignatius's mother, his mother's fiance, a virago or two, John Kennedy Toole, Ed Sullivan, and Myrna's concupiscent grandmother, Grandmother Horowitz, and you have the ingredients for a parody unlike any other ever written. With a foreword by Franz-Heinrich Katecki."

The Unfilmable Confederacy of Dunces

Author: Stephan Eicke
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476647712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
For more than 40 years, dozens of film directors, writers and producers tried and failed to adapt John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Along the way lawsuits were filed, filming locations destroyed, friendships shattered, reputations trashed, production companies bankrupted. Drawing on exclusive interviews, internal documents and private correspondence, this book tells the remarkable story of the non-making of A Confederacy of Dunces as a breathless and absurdist thriller. Celebrity appearances include John Belushi, Steven Soderbergh, Stephen Fry, Robin Williams, Warren Beatty and Harvey Weinstein, among others.

The Penguin Encyclopedia

Author: David Crystal
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 2002

Book Description
An authoritative reference that every family and office needs, "The Penguin Encyclopedia" contains more than 28,000 entries on the facts, events, issues, people, beliefs, and achievements that make up the sum of human knowledge and experience. Timely entries include SARS, Ozzy Osbourne, the war in Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction. 0-14-051543-7$35.00 / Penguin Group

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Book Analysis)

Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
ISBN: 2808002009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 26

Book Description
Unlock the more straightforward side of A Confederacy of Dunces with this concise and insightful summary and analysis ! This engaging summary presents an analysis of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, a picaresque novel which follows the life of Ignatius J. Reilly, an eccentric, self-absorbed layabout whose endeavours always seem to be doomed to failure. The novel’s comic tone stands in sharp contrast to its bleak portrayal of working-class life, and it has been lauded for its accurate and comprehensive depiction of the dialects of New Orleans. John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist whose work was not published until a decade after his suicide at the age of 31. A Confederacy of Dunces is generally considered his masterpiece, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Find out everything you need to know about A Confederacy of Dunces in a fraction of the time ! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: •A complete plot summary •Character studies •Key themes and symbols •Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries !