Ken and Thelma

Ken and Thelma

Author: Fletcher, Joel

Publisher: Pelican Publishing

Published: 2005-03-31

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781455606986

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"Ken has a real gift for mimicry and a refined sense of the absurd . . . the English faculty . . .both fear and court Ken because of his biting comic talent." --from Joel L. Fletcher's journal John Kennedy Toole's first published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, which Walker Percy called a"gargantuan tumultuous human tragi-comedy," became a publishing phenomenon, with almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. The book's outrageous protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, is an icon of contemporary American fiction. Now Ken and Thelma sheds new light on the tragic life story of the author, known as 'Ken' to his friends. Drawing on his own journals and personal letters, Joel L. Fletcher recreates his friendship with Ken in the early 1960s and his long association with Ken's indomitable mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, after the book's publication. Ken and Thelma features personal photographs, many never before published.


Butterfly in the Typewriter

Butterfly in the Typewriter

Author: Cory MacLauchlin

Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0306820404

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The long-awaited biography of John Kennedy Toole ("A Confederacy of Dunces"), whose fascinating life and tragic death is one of the most amazing publishingstories in American literature.


Ignatius Rising

Ignatius Rising

Author: René Pol Nevils

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-04-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780807130599

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The phenomenal success of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is now legendary, a story that has long beckoned a deeper exploration into the life, imagination, and demise of the writer responsible for one of American literature's most memorable characters -- Ignatius J. Reilly. In Ignatius Rising, René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy present the first biography of Toole, drawing upon scores of interviews with contemporaries of the writer and acquaintances of his influencing mother, Thelma, as well as unpublished letters, documents, and photographs. Frank yet sympathetic, Ignatius Rising deftly describes a life that is dark, tragic, bizarre, and amazing -- but luminous with the gift of laughter, a life not unlike those of Toole's beloved characters, now loved the world over.


A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces

Author: John Kennedy Toole

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0802197620

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "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, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).


The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible

Author: John Kennedy Toole

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0802197329

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“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty” (Orlando Sentinel). 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. “Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “John Kennedy Toole’s tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked To Kill A Mockingbird you will love The Neon Bible.” —Florence King “Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” —Kerry Luft, Chicago Tribune


The Unfilmable Confederacy of Dunces

The Unfilmable Confederacy of Dunces

Author: Stephan Eicke

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-12-19

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1476647712

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For more than 40 years, dozens of film directors, writers and producers tried and failed to adapt John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Along the way lawsuits were filed, filming locations destroyed, friendships shattered, reputations trashed, production companies bankrupted. Drawing on exclusive interviews, internal documents and private correspondence, this book tells the remarkable story of the non-making of A Confederacy of Dunces as a breathless and absurdist thriller. Celebrity appearances include John Belushi, Steven Soderbergh, Stephen Fry, Robin Williams, Warren Beatty and Harvey Weinstein, among others.


Life As We Lived It

Life As We Lived It

Author: Patricia Burns

Publisher: Author House

Published: 2014-06-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1496911148

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Patricia "Pat" Burns retired from CBS Inc. in 1995 after 30 years with that company. In retirement, she devotes her time to blogging, travel and in pursuit of her avocation, writing. She and her husband celebrated their 60rd wedding anniversary in October 2011. This book is a reflection of their first 44 year. She is currently working on a second book in this series which will share their many adventures in retirement. She and her husband reside in Glendale California when they are not on the road, in the air or on the sea.


Thelma’s Phase Two

Thelma’s Phase Two

Author: John A Campbell

Publisher: Balboa Press

Published: 2019-09-23

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1504319133

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Thelma is a troubled young woman in Townsville in the 1980s. A man comes to her aid and before long they are married. They travel to a small town of less than a dozen homes in the west of the state. Her husband goes to work on a sheep property. Thelma is an inventive person and soon surprises her neighbours with the things in her home. She helps people and also helps at the pub where she averts a hold up. A dog helps to make her days. Her husband takes a job in the Northern Territory and only comes home every six weeks for a fortnight. After his death she has lots of money and becomes a member of a mining group.


Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South

Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South

Author: Bryan Giemza

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-07-08

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0807150916

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In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish American authors and their interrelationships within both transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time—writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate (O’Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O’Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and contradictions. Flannery O’Connor, for example, resisted identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy, described by some as “anti-Catholic,” continues a dialogue with the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish community of Flannery O’Connor’s native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza’s own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an enduring literature, and a national image.


Million Dollar Dilemma

Million Dollar Dilemma

Author: Judy Baer

Publisher: Steeple Hill

Published: 2008-05-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1426817339

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So when over $20 million falls into her lap, Cassia Carr views her Midas touch as a cross, not a blessing—and certainly doesn’t anticipate the difficulty of giving it all away! And it’s hard enough to gauge romantic feelings without the chaos of a major windfall. Her globetrotting neighbor, Adam Cavanaugh, seems interested—but in Cassia or her fortune? When Adam abruptly disappears, should Cassia forget him or follow her heart to an unknown, life-changing destination?