Best of the Backlist Book Club: "A Confederacy of Dunces"

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book.”—The Washington Post

“An astonishingly good novel, radiant with intelligence and artful high comedy.”—Newsweek

“One of the funniest books ever written . . . it will make you laugh out loud till your belly aches and your eyes water.”—The New Republic

“The episodes explode one after the other like fireworks on a stormy night. No doubt about it, this book is destined to become a classic.”—The Baltimore Sun

“The dialogue is superbly mad. You simply sweep along, unbelievably entranced.”—The Boston Globe

“An astonishingly original and assured comic spree.”—New York Magazine

“As hilarious as it indisputably is, A Confederacy of Dunces is a serious and important work.”— Los Angeles Herald Examiner

"If a book's price is measured against the laughs it provokes, A Confederacy of Dunces is the bargain of the year." — Time

“A brilliant and evocative novel.” —San Francisco Chronicle

"I found myself laughing out loud again and again as I read this ribald book." —Christian Science Monitor

“Crazy magnificent once-in-a-blue-moon first novel. . . . There is a touch of genius about Toole and what he has created.” —Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece of character comedy . . . brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Astonishing, extravagant, lunatic, satiric, and peculiar, but it is above all genuine, skillful, and unsentimentally comic.” —Booklist

Ignatius J. Reilly is Bette Midler’s favorite hero of fiction (Vanity Fair, August 2008)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. At 16 in 1954, he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he shelved in the same year, not finding a willing publisher; he later dismissed it as "adolescent". Toole was a successful and popular professor, first at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now ULL), at Hunter College, and finally in New Orleans. Having persuaded Simon & Schuster, however, to accept A Confederacy of Dunces, he was unable to resolve editorial disputes. Due in part to the novel's failure, he suffered from paranoia and depression, dying by suicide at the age of 31.

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