A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly. He’s a thirty-year-old medievalist who lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge.

Then one day, his quiet life of tyrannizing his mother screeches to a halt. A near-arrest. A fender-bender. And suddenly our reluctant hero is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

What follows is one of the funniest, most gloriously chaotic misadventures in American literature. Ignatius stumbles from one calamity to the next, surrounded by a cast of unforgettable characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo, the perpetually thwarted Miss Trixie, and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate.

The subplots twist together with all the intricate delight of a Dickens novel. But it’s Ignatius himself—selfish, deluded, tragic, and larger than life—who carries the story. A modern-day Quixote railing against the giants of the modern age, with a streak of melancholy hidden beneath all that antic bluster.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and now a beloved classic of Southern comedy and absurdist black humor, this is a book readers pass along like a secret handshake.

We can’t tell you how many times we’ve watched someone open these pages, snort with laughter, and glance up wondering why nobody warned them.

Consider yourself warned. Grab a copy, find a cozy corner, and let Ignatius do his worst. You’ll thank us later.

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