A Confederacy of Dunces [VINTAGE 2011] [TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION]

As new condition beige linen boards with purple spine lettering contained in a fine condition color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Preliminary Page Quote by Jonathan Swift; Introduction to the Tewntieth-Anniversary Edition by Andrei Codrescu; Foreword by Walker Percy and Preliminary Page Quotes by A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana. Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. "What a delight, what a roaring, rollicking, footstomping wonder this book is. I laughed until my sides ached, and then I laughed on." - Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times. "A masterwork of comedy.The novel astonishes with its inventiveness, it lives in the play of its voices. A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing less than a grand comic fuge." - New York Times Book Review. "If a book's price is measured against the laughs it provokes, A Confederacy of Dunces is the bargain of the year." - Time. "A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book." - Washington Post. "The mix of high and low comedy is almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic." - Kirkus Reviews. "A Confederacy of Dunces has been reviewed almost everywhere, and every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right." - Rolling Stone. " "It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers." - Walker Percy. When Walker Percy penned these prophetic words in his foreword to the first edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, he could not have known just how wide Toole's "world of readers" would become. Released by Louisiana State University Press in April 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today, there are over 1,500,000 copies in print (as of 2011) worldwide in eighteen languages. Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Percy dubs "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one - who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age." Ignatius' ire explodes when his mother backs her car into another automobile. The owner of the damaged vehicle insists on payment; Mrs. Reilly demands that her son cease watching television and writing in his Big Chief tablet and get a job. Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changes by their presences - Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses. Satire and farce animate A Confederacy of Dunces; tragic awareness ennobles it. To celebrate the book's twentieth anniversary in 2000, the writer and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu composed a new introduction that examines the relationship of this modern-day classic to the city whose pulse it brilliantly captures." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.…