FROM OUR EDITORS

Published a decade after the death of the author, this wildly inventive comic masterpiece features one of the most unforgettable characters in modern fiction: Ignatius Reilly, a mammoth misfit Medievalist hilariously at odds with the 20th-century world.

ANNOTATION

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, A Confederacy of Dunces was not published until a decade after the death of the author. This wildly inventive and amusing novel features one of the most unforgettable characters in modern fiction: Ignatius Reilly. He's a mammoth misfit Medievalist hilariously at odds with the world of the twentieth century, and his adventures take him to 'way down, to New Orleans' lower depths.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A spectacular, Pultizer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy, beloved by readers and critics alike. The place is the French Quarter, the characters, denizens of New Orleans's lower depths.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Oooo-eeee! Toole's outrageous rambling farce comes to life with the wonderful voices of Arte Johnson--surely one of the greatest matches ever of the written to the spoken word. Toole's novel, written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in the early 1980s, is one of the great comic works of the century and still fresh 35 years later. Toole's finest achievement is protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a great intellectual and deadbeat glutton who roams the squalor and charm of New Orleans causing enormous chaos, selling a few hot dogs from his weenie wagon, and suffering a pyloric valve shutdown at the general looniness of the characters he meets in places like the Night of Joy nightclub. Johnson has created a unique voice for each of the many fantastic, overblown crazies woven into this wild story. It's unfortunate that the audio version is abridged. Still, the spirit of the original is here. Highly recommended for all listeners who love a great belly laugh at the human condition.--Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX

AudioFile - Yuri Rasovsky

A giant adult brat in New Orleans is so monstrously self-absorbed, opinionated and cocksure of himself as to create hilarious mayhem wherever he goes. In this carefully abridged version of a Pulitzer Prize-winning tale, Arte Johnson goes way over the top, leaving no stone of comic phrasing and vocal mugging unturned. If you remember his silly face from "Laugh-In," you can imagine how much fun he must have been in-studio. His lack of discipline mutes the jollity a hair for listeners, but he still provides plenty of laughs. Y.R. ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Time

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

Henry Kisor

The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredible true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures." -- Chicago Sun-Times

Newsweek