Walker Percy

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

In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst Includes the landmark, National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, in a fully annotation edition A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of "the malaise," Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books. The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours." In The Last Gentleman (1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of d j vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred. A satirical work of speculative fiction, Love in the Ruins (1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left. Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists' Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of deja vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people's conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened. The novel follows Will Barrett's adventures as he becomes involved in the complex troubles, loves, and fortunes of a Southern family, the Vaughts, that is living in the shadow of their youngest son's illness. With settings ranging from New York to Alabama, Louisiana to New Mexico, this is an ambitious, funny, compulsively readable novel about the dilemmas of modern man.

Lancelot Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don't seem worth remembering--until a visit from an old friend and classmate gives him the opportunity to recount his journey of dark violence. It began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter. That discovery touched off his obsession to reverse the degeneration of modern America and begin a new age of chivalry and romance. With ever increasing fury, Lancelot would become a shining knight, not of romance--but of revenge.

When Dr. Tom More (of Love in the Ruins) is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred and where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. Upon arriving, he notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, a lack of complexity in speech--even his own wife's extraordinary success at bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer. With the ingenious help of his attractive cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, More begins to uncover a criminal experiment to "improve" people's behavior by drugging the local water supply. But beyond this scheme are activities so sinister that even Tom More wouldn't believe them if he hadn't witnessed them with his own eyes.

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

Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.

In the late 1940s, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, friends since their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi, began a correspondence that would last until Percy's death in 1990. Walker Percy, the highly regarded author of The Moviegoer, wrote six novels, two volumes of philosophical writings, and numerous essays. Shelby Foote met with early success as a novelist, but his reputation today rests more upon his massive three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, and his role as commentator in Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War. The correspondence between Percy and Foote traces their lives from the beginning of their respective careers, when they were grappling fiercely and openly with their ambitions, artistic doubts, and personal problems. Although they discuss such serious matters as the death of Foote's mother and Percy's battle with cancer, their letters are full of sly humor and good-natured ribbing. Jay Tolson has selected, edited, and annotated the letters of these two remarkable writers to shed light on their relationship and their literary careers. Includes an eight-page insert with photographs of the writers chronicling their friendship.

A good local history is an excellent andagreeable thing. It pleases on two counts. It satisfies the curiosity of theinhabitants of a region, whether newcomers or old settlers, especially if noadequate history had existed before. It dispels myths, corrects old wives'tales. And, if the history is first-rate, it goes beyond a factual account ofpersons and places, the particularities of a region, and shows the significanceof these human happenings in a larger scheme of things, in this case theemergence of a new nation.Ellis's history succeeds on both counts. It is a delightful andauthoritative account of lore which not even St. Tammanyites may have heard of.Did you know, for example, that there was once a flourishing wine industry inSt. Tammany Parish? That local vineyards produced excellent red and whitewines, the red from Concord grapes, the white from Herbemont? Did you know thatin 1891 a rice crop of 50,000 barrels was harvested, half the entire output ofSouth Carolina? . . .Ellis has rendered this pleasant and authoritative history in a graceful andlively style and with a genuine affection for the people he writes about.Walker PercyFrom the Foreword

Winner of the 1962 National Book Award and one of Time magazine's 100 Best English-Language Novels, Walker Percy's debut The Moviegoer is an American masterpiece and a classic of Southern literature. Insightful, romantic, and humorous, it is the story of a young man's search for meaning amid a shallow consumerist landscape. Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker, fills his days with movies and casual sex. His life offers him nothing worth retaining; what he treasures are scenes from The Third Man or Stagecoach, not the personal experiences he knows other people hold dear. On the cusp of turning thirty, however, something changes: At Mardi Gras, he embarks on a quest for some form of authentic experience. The consequences of Binx's quest, on both himself and his unstable cousin Kate, prove outrageous, absurd, moving, and indelible. Featuring an afterword by Paul Elie, this new edition of The Moviegoer cements Walker Percy's place as a giant of American literature.

The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind's spiritual flu. But first he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen--and discover why so many living people are actually dead. Attempting to save the world from completely destroying itself, Tom ultimately begins to understand the quality and caprices of life and the uncontrollable vagaries of time and chance.

Will Barrett of Linwood, North Carolina, is a depressed widower with a peculiar tendency to fall down in strange places. Allison, the girl in the greenhouse, has just escaped from a mental institution and is working hard to make a new life for herself. When their paths cross in a most unusual manner, a relationship begins that will help restore two struggling outcasts to new life. What follows is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will undertakes his own Pascalian wager in search of proof of the existence of God. Leaving his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and descending deep into the bowels of the long-unused Lost Cove cave, he is prepared to wait for a sign--which may, of course, be death. What he is not prepared for is what actually happens.

Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. "Lost in the Cosmos" invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.

Will Barrett (also the hero of Percy's "The Last Gentleman") is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. "The Second Coming" is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more.

Will Barrett is a 25-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City, detached from his roots and with no plans for the future, until the purchase of a telescope sets off a romance and changes his life forever.

In "Message" i"n the" "Bottle," Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.