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.
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).
"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.
Do you want to pick up a light saber whenever you hear John Williams' Star Wars theme? Get the urge to ride into the desert and face down steely-eyed desperados to the refrain of Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Does Hans Zimmer's Pirates of the Caribbean score have you talking like Jack Sparrow? From the Westerns of the 1960s to current blockbusters, composers for both film and television have faced new challenges--evermore elaborate sound design, temp tracks, test audiences and working with companies that invest in film score recordings all have led to creative sparks, as well as frustrations. Drawing on interviews with more than 40 notable composers, this book gives an in-depth analysis of the industry and reveals the creative process behind such artists as Klaus Badelt, Mychael Danna, Abel Korzeniowski, Walter Murch, Rachel Portman, Alan Silvestri, Randy Thom and others.
Adrian Healy loves to lie, and already in his public school career, marked by privilege and pederasty, he had lost the ability to differentiate between simple truth and his elaborate fictions.
“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 bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • “A dyspeptic satire that owes much to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon . . . propelled by Kaufman’s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull’s-eye wit."—The Washington Post “An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . an exceptionally good [book].”—The New York Times Book Review • “Kaufman is a master of language . . . a sight to behold.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND MEN’S HEALTH B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made—a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete—B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être. A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.
The million copy, Booker Prize finalist, besteller “To describe this novel as spine-tingling in its indescribable poetic effect would be to trivialize its profoundly tragic theme. Say then that it is heart-stunning.”—The New York Times It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of the twentieth century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.
As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked strategies that Roger employs to disembarrass Dale of his faith, form the substance of this novel—these and the current of erotic attraction that pulls Esther, Roger’s much younger wife, away from him and into Dale’s bed. The novel, a majestic allegory of faith and reason, ends also as a black comedy of revenge, for this is Roger’s version—Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—made new for a disbelieving age.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO IGNATIUS J. REILLY? In this parody of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole, John Kennedy Toole Jr. plunges Ignatius J. Reilly into a New York City winter wonderland, where our Falstaffian hero inadvertently becomes vice president of the Charlie Chan Chinese Fortune Cookie Company, and where he finds a recently unearthed slip of paper that contains an occult secret for overthrowing the governments of the world (in a most unusual way, of course). Ignatius's parodic adventures would not be complete without his nemesis-friend, Myrna Minkoff. Add to the mix her parents, Mr. Minkoff and Mrs. Minkoff, two inept government agents (is there a redundancy here?), Ignatius's mother, his mother's fiance, a virago or two, John Kennedy Toole, Ed Sullivan, and Myrna's concupiscent grandmother, Grandmother Horowitz, and you have the ingredients for a parody unlike any other ever written. With a foreword by Franz-Heinrich Katecki."
