A Confederacy of Dunces

Here is Ignatius Reilly, a slob extraordinaire, a deranged Oliver Hardy, a corpulent Don Quixote, and a perverted Thomas Aquinas all rolled into one. He is violently revolting against the modern era, lying in his flannel nightshirt in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, and filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective between enormous seizures of flatulence and eructations.

According to his mother, he must report to work. He does a variety of professions. Every work quickly turns into a crazy journey or a complete catastrophe, yet they all have their own sinister logic, much like Don Quixote's.

Myrna Minkoff, his lover from the Bronx, believes he should have sex.

Ignatius is an academic, an ideology, a slacker, a fool, and a glutton. His enormous bloats, his thundering scorn, and his one-man fight against all of them—Freud, Protestants, homosexuals, heterosexuals, and other excesses of the contemporary era—should disgust the reader.

A New Orleans-set tragicomedy.