John Kennedy Toole Libros

El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes más memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly –una mezcla de Oliver Hardy delirante, Don Quijote adiposo y Tomás de Aquino perverso, reunidos en una persona–, que a los treinta años aún vive con su estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de «teología y geometría» como de «decencia y buen gusto»; un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve «catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporánea», fiebre a la que Ignatius añadirá unos cuantos grados más. La conjura de los necios se hizo acreedora al Premio Pulitzer, y en Francia fue galardonada el año de su publicación como «la mejor novela en lengua extranjera». «Una novela disparatada, bufa, rabelesiana y sorprendente, que rompe con los cauces habituales de la narrativa norteamericana actual. Una tragicomedia cósmica, cuya lectura hace alternar la carcajada y la angustia» (El País). «Irresistiblemente divertida, una comedia épica en la gran tradición de Cervantes y Fielding» (Monroe K. Spears). «Este libro se ha reseñado en todas partes, y a todos los críticos les ha entusiasmado. Por una vez, todos tenían razón» (Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone).

The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.

Alive with jazz and tropical flowers, its streets an intoxicating 24-hour party, New Orleans exerts a hypnotic effect on virtually every visitor and resident, but perhaps none have been more susceptible to its exotic charm than the writers who have lived there. From Mark Twain to William Faulkner to Anne Rice; from Kate Chopin to Zora Neale Hurston to Ellen Gilchrist; from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote to Walker Percy, the authors in this remarkable collection celebrate the city that stirs their imaginations as no other can. Third in our best-selling series of anthologies centered around America's great cities, New Orleans Stories includes not only "literature," but also interviews, ghost stories, and voodoo charms. Perfect for first-time visitors as well as longtime residents, it re-creates the heady, mesmerizing atmosphere of New Orleans itself.