Manon in modern dress… In the 1950’s Terry Southern burlesqued Voltaire’s Candide, a send-up of Enlightenment-era optimism. The story of an ingenue braving a world of male sexual predators, Candy became a cult-classic, despite its initial and unpropitious reception: It was banned in France under its original title, Lollipop, and was also banned in the U.S. Times and tastes change, ages-old hypocrisies remain. A generation later, Manny Lesko, or The Erotic History of Estelle Francine Antoinette Chevalier, derives its burlesque inspiration from L’Abbe Prevost’s classic romance, Manon Lescaut. Call it a Manon Transmogrified, Prevost’s heroine is re-inscribed as Manny Lesko, “the most beautiful azure-eyed bipartisan on the planet.” A send-up of gender politics—parts switched, to put it indelicately—Manny Lesko is a triple threat concoction of romance, social satire, and memoir. A true and twisted tale of the American Nineties, and “going forward.”