This is one of the
funniest books I’ve read, ranking alongside the works of my other
favorite literary humorists, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Terry
Pratchett, and Chuck Palahniuk.
It’s a book that you really should avoid
reading in public places because its main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is
always doing or saying something ridiculous. In fact, Ignatius is one of the
main reasons this is such a unique book.
An overly educated misanthrope, he
spends most of the novel traipsing around New Orleans while lecturing
anyone who will listen about his medieval view of Catholicism and monarchy or
his ideas about “Fortuna” acquired from years of obsessively studying the
philosophy of Boethius.
This contrasts hilariously ironically with his
gluttonous lifestyle and almost Lenin-esque radical workplace practices, which
are still also somehow lazy. He’s a character so bizarre—simultaneously
encapsulating the worst of both the far-right and the far-left—that it’s better
to suggest reading the book rather than trying to explain him.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'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…
This memoir deals with the present reality and future
likely realities of being a poor person in rural, “fly-over” America.
Smarsh
details her upbringing in Kansas while describing the people who influenced
her. This is a well-written, educational book I — as someone who grew up in rural
Kentucky — easily connected with and thoroughly enjoyed.
*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*
An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.*
Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through…
Some of
the novel's events, so violent in nature, can be difficult to think about,
but that's part of what lends the Biblical character to much of McCarthy's work, which is in large part what
makes his books so unique a reading experience.
Mostly, though, I think there
is much to be learned as a writer from examining McCarthy's works at a sentence
level. He writes beautiful, poetic, epic sentences, and I can only hope to
attempt emulation in my own work.
By Cormac McCarthy, the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
Life in
Abry is just about as normal as it can get. Church, school, and football
games make up the community's pillars.
But not everyone fits in, including teenager Edward
Marsh, who doesn't WANT to fit in. Edward wants to be himself, and if that
means hanging out in a graveyard with his friends or pulling a prank on the
uptight football coach, the town can deal with it.
This
tale of small-town life set at the turn of the century will have you yearning
for a simpler time. And it will make you realize that simpler times were never
really all that simple.
