Oooo-eeee! Toole's outrageous rambling farce comes to life with the wonderful voices of Arte Johnson--surely one of the greatest matches ever of the written to the spoken word. Toole's novel, written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in the early 1980s, is one of the great comic works of the century and still fresh 35 years later. Toole's finest achievement is protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a great intellectual and deadbeat glutton who roams the squalor and charm of New Orleans causing enormous chaos, selling a few hot dogs from his weenie wagon, and suffering a pyloric valve shutdown at the general looniness of the characters he meets in places like the Night of Joy nightclub. Johnson has created a unique voice for each of the many fantastic, overblown crazies woven into this wild story. It's unfortunate that the audio version is abridged. Still, the spirit of the original is here. Highly recommended for all listeners who love a great belly laugh at the human condition.--Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX
If you love to laugh then you’re in luck, because we’ve gathered 50 of the funniest books of all time on this can’t-miss list. From the dark and dry to the witty and wry, from the fictive to the factual, from travel logs to comedic blogs, this extensive collection of humor both classic and new […]
In the fall and winter, movies get a bit more serious than they do in the summer, when it’s all aliens invading, superheroes saving us from alien invasions, and 80-minute animated toy commercials. These high-minded, late-in-the-year films are the ones competing for awards consideration and as such many are adapted from bestselling or critically-praised novels. […]
The comic novel is not a genre as popular as it once was. This form, generally expressed in the format of a sane narrator slowly unraveling at the slowly-building chaos around them, or responding to a bunch of crazy characters or situations, had its big cultural moment in the middle of the 20th century, and […]
It’s easy to celebrate smart people—detectives who figure out mysteries just by observing clues, evil geniuses who devise horrific ways of ending the world and the sullen brainiacs who defeat them, anyone who figures out how to game the system and come out on top. But let’s put aside the hero-worship, because we all know that in […]
The difficulty level of writing a novel varies depending on who you ask, and when. On the one hand, you have people who’ve labored for decades to write a single novel. On the other, there are those adventurous souls who gather online every year to write a novel in 30 days. And then there are the authors […]