“Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose. 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. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole’s heirs. 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. “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). Set in oversized type for ease in reading, the large print edition will gratify both first-timers seeking to discover this modern-day classic and longtime afficionados wishing to reread a favorite novel. Included here is the introduction that writer and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu composed for the book's twentieth anniversary. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changed by their presence - Ignatius and his mother Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry Jones the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubs 'slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.' Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title.

Now, for the first time, John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece is available in a large print edition.

Today there are almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages.

Rejected by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Released by Louisiana State University Press in 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon.

A cornucopia of dunderheads