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THEATRE We the People Shakespeare's Globe, SE1 ..... THERE can be little disagreement that the American Constitution, in place for 219 years, is a fine thing. Unfortunately, Eric Schlosser's new piece about the genesis thereof is not. Even the most ardent advocates of...

ALTHOUCH LSU PRESS turns 65 this year, there won't be a party to mark the occasion. Instead, the celebratory focus is on the 20th anniversary in April of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Baton Rouge--based press's all-time top-selling and best-known...

The Army Corps of Engineers closed a gate on a suburban canal as heavy rains lashed the flood-prone city, raising fears that climbing waters threatened to top the walls holding them back.After more than 8 inches of rain fell on parts of New Orleans by...

Back when summer actually meant a few months of relaxing and down time to New Yorkers, one of the most treasured rituals was the weekly trip to the neighborhood bookstore, to choose a new book (or stack of books) to keep one company at the...

[Persuaded by John Kennedy Toole's mother to read the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces, Walker Percy comments in his foreword to the novel:] I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader ma...

There are readers—and I am one—who keep calm in the face of the stormiest comic novels. Wit, farce, satire, nonsense: I may be vastly tickled, but I do not laugh out loud. Till now. To the charms of … "A Confederacy of Dunces" I succumbed, stunned and seduced, page after page, vocal with delight. It gave me such pleasure that I would be ungrateful not to report here at the outset that, for all its flaws, it is a masterwork of comedy. (p. 7) A dozen characters bounce off ea...

[A Confederacy of Dunces] is a corker. It is a gross farce, a blustering satire, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book that begins with a solitary fat man but quickly picks up cops and B-girls, clerks and capitalists, most of the "deviates" and "degenerates" of the French Quarter of New Orleans, and keeps right on gathering momentum until it sweeps away everything, including that most innocent of bystanders, the reader, in its path…. [Ignatius] is writing...