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A Confederacy of Dunces
A Literary Fiction Novel by John Kennedy Toole
Subgenres:
- Humor,
- New Orleans,
- Satire
This book is for you if you're into...
- Eccentric antiheroes bumbling through New Orleans misadventures
- Comic novels with unforgettable, larger-than-life protagonists
From Little Stack
John Kennedy Toole died 11 years before his magnum opus was published, so he never got to see it become one of the most beloved novels in Southern American fiction, and also one of the funniest.
A Confederacy of Dunces is the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy and misanthropic wannabe intellect who still lives at home with his mother and who traverses New Orleans in search of employment and entertainment. The book and its hero have become icons of New Orleans, thanks to Toole's vivid depiction of the city and its dialects.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.
So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction.
The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pulitzer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans. This book has become an American comic masterpiece.
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The Neon Bible
1989
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