Why did I love this book?
The hyperintelligent and dysfunctional 30-year-old protagonist of this novel lives with his mother in New Orleans and is obsessed with all things medieval. He has picaresque adventures in the French Quarter. The novel is laugh-out-loud funny and yet poignant—something I strive for as a writer of tragicomedy. My novel is similarly steeped in a place—those grieving engage in a process of cementing associations to the lost loved one, and those referents are often tied to the shared spaces they inhabited together.
15 authors picked A Confederacy of Dunces as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD
'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
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'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…