John Kennedy Toole Boeken

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of a fleshy head, with earflaps and large ears sticking out like turn signals. Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the tragicomic hero of this tale. At 30, he lives with his mother in New Orleans, writing his magnum opus on hidden Big Chief pads and recounting a traumatic Greyhound journey. His quiet life of tyrannizing his mother is disrupted when Patrolman Mancuso mistakes him for a vagrant, leading to a car accident with his tipsy mother. Suddenly, Ignatius finds himself searching for a job, stumbling through various misadventures. His brief stint as a hotdog vendor fails, and he upends the Levy Pants Company. Along the way, he encounters a cast of colorful characters, including stripper Darlene and her cockatoo, the thwarted retiree Miss Trixie, the flamboyant Dorian Greene, the sinister Miss Lee, and Myrna Minkoff, the woman he loves to hate. The intricate subplots rival those of Dickens, beautifully woven together by the end. Ignatius, selfish and deluded yet larger than life, is a modern-day Quixote facing contemporary giants. His comedic bluster conceals a deep melancholy, making him a poignant figure. John Kennedy Toole, who tragically took his own life in 1969, left behind Ignatius as a fitting tribute to his tormented genius.

The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.

Alive with jazz and tropical flowers, its streets an intoxicating 24-hour party, New Orleans exerts a hypnotic effect on virtually every visitor and resident, but perhaps none have been more susceptible to its exotic charm than the writers who have lived there. From Mark Twain to William Faulkner to Anne Rice; from Kate Chopin to Zora Neale Hurston to Ellen Gilchrist; from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote to Walker Percy, the authors in this remarkable collection celebrate the city that stirs their imaginations as no other can. Third in our best-selling series of anthologies centered around America's great cities, New Orleans Stories includes not only "literature," but also interviews, ghost stories, and voodoo charms. Perfect for first-time visitors as well as longtime residents, it re-creates the heady, mesmerizing atmosphere of New Orleans itself.