John Kennedy Toole

Et forbund av idioter av John Kennedy Toole er en av etterkrigstidens morsomste romaner. Her møter vi Ignatius J. Reilly, en dypt misantropisk mann, som bor hjemme hos sin mor i New Orleans. Han er en sprenglærd, arbeidsløs mann som tilbringer dagene sine med å se på søppel-tv, gå på kino og høylytt forbanne tiden han er født inn i. Ignatius er en pest og en plage for alle rundt seg og kjemper en konstant tapende kamp mot sitt eget mage- og tarmsystem. Et forbund av idioter er intet mindre enn en kultbok, en hysterisk satire der et utall karakterer på ulike deler av den sosiale rangstigen dukker opp, og Ignatius har noe å si til dem alle sammen. Ignatius er nett-trollets gudfar, før internett, og romanen han hjemsøker er like morsom og treffende som da den ble skrevet midt på sekstitallet. Forfatteren tok sitt eget liv som 31-åring i 1969, og ble aldri publisert i sin levetid. Etter enormt påtrykk fra forfatterens mor, kom romanen omsider ut i 1980. Den vant Pulitzer-prisen det følgende året. «Et mesterverk [...] Den er intet mindre enn en komisk symfoni.» — The New York Times Book Review «Sannsynligvis min favorittbok gjennom alle tider» — Billy Connolly, komiker

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 ConnollyA 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

En av litteraturhistoriens roligaste böcker i efterlängtad nyutgåvaMöt Ignatius J. Reilly, en modern Don Quijote i en lat, självupptagen och misantropisk mans kropp. Trettio år gammal bor Ignatius fortfarande hemma hos sin mamma i 1960-talets New Orleans, där han i sitt omåttliga förakt för allt modernt drömmer sig tillbaka till den gamla goda medeltiden. När hans mamma en natt kraschar deras bil - efter att tillsammans med Ignatius ha flytt från polisen och gömt sig på en strippklubb - tvingas han ta klivet ut i den verkliga världen och skaffa sig ett jobb. Romanen publicerades 1980, elva år efter Kennedy Tooles död vid bara trettioett års ålder. Det då refuserade manuskriptet hade han lämnat kvar i en kartong på sitt rum, och det var bara tack vare hans mammas oupphörliga försök som boken till slut blev utgiven. Året därpå belönades romanen med Pulitzerpriset. I översättning av Einar Heckscher. JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE [1937-1969] var en amerikansk författare, mest känd för den postumt utgivna romanen Dumskallarnas sammansvärjning, som ofta kallats världens roligaste bok och 2019 utsågs av BBC till en av världens hundra mest inspirerande romaner.

The accomplished and evocative first novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces.John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript was finally published twenty years after Toole's death.The Neon Bible opens with the narrator, a young man named David, on a train, leaving the small Southern town he's grown up in for the first time. What unspools is the tender and tragic coming-of-age story of a lonely child, a story that revolves around David's unorthodox friendship with his great-aunt Mae - a former stage performer who is fiercely at odds with the conservative townspeople - and the everyday toll of living in an environment of religious fanaticism. 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.

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 ConnollyA 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...This stunning clothbound edition of John Kennedy Toole's savagely funny, satirical masterpiece is designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith.'A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities ... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue'The New York Times

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 fianc , 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.

After more than three decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers. Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during Toole's lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son's suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in twenty-three languages.The 35th anniversary edition of A Confederacy of Dunces celebrates Toole's novel as well as one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed ""slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one."" Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.The genius of A Confederacy of Dunces is reaffirmed as successive generations embrace this extravagant satire. Adulation for Toole's comic epic remains as intense today as thirty-five years ago.

"This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me."Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by this? No. For this misanthropic crusader against an America fallen into vice and ignorance has a mission: to rescue a naked female philosopher in distress. And he has a pirate costume and hot-dog cart to do it with . . .

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."--The New York Times Book Review 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, Pultizer 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.

An obese New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly gets a job at his mother's urging but ends up leading a workers' revolt, in a twentieth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Reprint.

David's father goes off to war, leaving David and his mother to fight poverty and shame on their own in a small Southern town