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A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

Speaking of autoscopic doubles (Toole-Ignatius Reilly) I’m working on a review of Cory MacLauchlin’s Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Cory reminds us that today marks the death of Toole. It is often said “how can one assess the greatness of the author on one work?”…

literature

Life as Literature

I’ve been thinking a lot about my instinctive predilection for writers whose life and work bleed into each other, an attraction I felt long before I was fully aware of their biographical details. The first was Kafka; the second Rolfe; the third Musil; the fourth Mishima and the fifth, Toole. I’ve come to the conclusion that these philosophical novelists…