Download or read book Walker Percy s Search for Community written by John F. Desmond and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this criticism of Percy, John F. Desmond traces the writer's enduring concerns with community. These concerns, Desmond argues, were grounded in the realism of such Scholastics as Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
Download or read book The Moviegoer written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.
Download or read book Love in the Ruins written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“A great adventure . . . So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless.” —Chicago Sun Times/divDIV/divDIVIn Walker Percy’s future America, the country is on the brink of disaster. With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior./divDIV /divDIVBut such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed./div /div
Download or read book Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer written by Brian A. Smith and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer is the first sustained treatment of Percy as a political thinker. The book argues that Percy provides a distinctive approach to politics, one that might allow us to give up the dangerous longing for limitless progress and perfection in our lives.
Download or read book Lost in the Cosmos written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.
Download or read book A Political Companion to Walker Percy written by Peter Augustine Lawler and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1962, Walker Percy (1916--1990) made a dramatic entrance onto the American literary scene when he won the National Book Award for fiction with his first novel, The Moviegoer. A physician, philosopher, and devout Catholic, Percy dedicated his life to understanding the mixed and somewhat contradictory foundations of American life as a situation faced by the wandering and won-dering human soul. His controversial works combined existential questioning, scientific investigation, the insight of the southern stoic, and authentic religious faith to produce a singular view of humanity's place in the cosmos that ranks among the best American political thinking. An authoritative guide to the political thought of this celebrated yet complex American author, A Political Companion to Walker Percy includes seminal essays by Ralph C. Wood, Richard Reinsch II, and James V. Schall, S.J., as well as new analyses of Percy's view of Thomistic realism and his reaction to the American pursuit of happiness. Editors Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith have assembled scholars of diverse perspectives who provide a necessary lens for interpreting Percy's works. This comprehensive introduction to Percy's "American Thomism" is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics.
Download or read book Lancelot written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling.” —The New York Times Book Review/divDIV/divDIVFed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world’s ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife—an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for years. Though he initially plans only to gather proof of her infidelity, Lancelot quickly descends into a fog of obsession. And as he crosses the line from sanity into madness, he will try once and for all to purify the world or destroy it in the attempt./divDIV /divDIVMesmerizing and unforgettable, Lancelot is a masterful story of one man’s collision with the follies of modern culture, and a thought-provoking look at the nature of good and evil./div /div
Download or read book Fyodor Dostoevsky Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide written by John F. Desmond and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A study of the phenomenon of suicide, both actual and spiritual, in the major fictional works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Walker Percy, drawing lines of continuity between the two authors and noting their differences. In the epilogue, Desmond offers a Christian counter-vision to the 'suicidal' ethos he has documented"--
Download or read book The Matter of High Words written by Robert Chodat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? When the explanations of the natural sciences become powerfully precise and authoritative, what is the status of our highest words, the languages that articulate our norms and orient our lives? The Matter of High Words examines a constellation of American writers who in the decades since World War II have posed these questions in distinctive ways. Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace are all self-consciously post-WWII authors, attuned to the fragmentation and skepticism that have defined so much of the literary and critical culture of the last century and more. Yet they also attempt to reach back to older forms of thought and writing that are often thought to have dried up-the traditions of prophecy, of wisdom literature, of the sage. Working within this dual inheritance, these authors are drawn equally to both art and argument, "showing" and "telling," shifting continually between narrative and discursive genres. In their essays they act as moralists, promoting the broad, abstract concepts that might inspire action in the face of naturalistic reduction: community, family, courage, fraternity, marriage, friendship, temperance, judgment. In their narratives, they offer particular lives in particular settings, thick descriptions that give flesh to such high words. Rarely do these movements between genres generate a tidy equilibrium; where their essays speak of cooperation and redemption, their narratives display alienation, loss, and failure. But in pursuing such risky, unorthodox strategies, these postwar sages are not only able to challenge some of the dominant naturalistic theories of the last several decades: cognitive science, neo-Darwinian theory, social science, the fact-value divide in analytic philosophy. Through five chapters of detailed analysis and close reading, Chodat explores the question of whether vocabularies of ought and ought-not can still emerge today, and how these concepts might be embodied, and whether such ideas might be found in things.
Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
Download or read book The Thanatos Syndrome written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVPercy’s stirring sequel to Love in the Ruins follows Tom More’s redemptive mission to cure the mysterious ailment afflicting the residents of his hometown/divDIV/divDIVDr. Tom More returns to his parish in Louisiana determined to live a simpler life. Fresh out of prison after getting caught selling uppers to truck drivers, he wants nothing more than to live “a small life.” But when everyone in town begins acting strangely—from losing their sexual inhibitions to speaking only in blunt, truncated sentences—More, with help from his cousin Lucy Lipscomb, takes it upon himself to reveal what and who is responsible. Their investigation leads them to the highest seats of power, where they discover that a government conspiracy is poised to rob its citizens of their selves, their free will, and ultimately their humanity./div /div
Download or read book The Message in the Bottle written by Walker Percy and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 1975-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Message" i"n the" "Bottle," Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.
Download or read book The Correspondence of Shelby Foote Walker Percy written by Shelby Foote and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death of Foote's mother and Percy's battle with cancer, their letters are full of sly humor, good-natured ribbing, and a large dose of self-mockery.
Download or read book Signposts in a Strange Land written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: “His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening” (Library Journal). Published just after Walker Percy’s death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South’s most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the mysteries of existence, to Catholicism and the joys of drinking bourbon, this collection offers a window into the underpinnings of Percy’s celebrated novels and brings to light the stirring thoughts and voice of a giant of twentieth century literature.
Download or read book Wingless Chickens Bayou Catholics and Pilgrim Wayfarers written by L. Lamar Nisly and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flannery O'Connor, Tim Gautreaux, and Walker Percy, are all Catholic writers from the South-and seem to embody very fully both parts of that label. Yet as quickly becomes clear in their writing, their fiction employs markedly different tones and modes of addressing their audience. O'Connor seems intent on shocking her reader, whom she anticipates will be hostile to her deepest beliefs. Gautreaux gently and humorously engages his reader, inviting his expected sympathetic audience to embrace the characters' needed moral growth. Percy satirically lampoons an array of social ills and failings in the Church, as he tries to get his audience laughing with him while he makes his deadly serious point about the flaws he finds in the church and larger culture. Why do these three writers assume such divergent images of their audience? Why do texts by three writers who each embrace their Southern locale and their Catholic beliefs seem to have so little in common? To answer these questions, Nisly helps readers understand these authors' fiction by examining the role that place and time had in shaping each author's idea of an audience-and, by extension, his or her manner of addressing that audience. More specifically, Nisly focuses on each author's experience of Catholic community and each author's placement in relation to the Second Vatican Council. Linking together biographical information and a reading of their fiction, Nisly argues that O'Connor's, Gautreaux's, and Percy's sense of audience has been shaped in significant ways by each author's own local experience of Catholicism in his or her home region as well as the larger, global changes of Vatican II that transformed Roman Catholicism.
Download or read book The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 924 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in one volume, two novels from the National Book Award winner that follow the life of a Southern man searching for love and connection. In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett has never felt at peace. After moving from his native South to New York City, Will’s most meaningful human connections come through the lens of a telescope in Central Park, from which he views the comings and goings of the eccentric Vaught family. But Will’s days as a spectator end when he meets the Vaught patriarch and accepts a job in the Mississippi Delta as caretaker for the family’s ailing son, Jamie. Once there, he is confronted not only by his personal demons, but also his growing love for Jamie’s sister, Kitty, and a deepening relationship with the Vaught family that will teach him the true meaning of home. And in The Second Coming, now in his late forties, Will Barrett lives a life other men only dream of. Wealthy from a successful career on Wall Street and from the inheritance of his deceased wife’s estate, Will is universally admired at the club where he spends his days golfing in the North Carolina sun. But everything begins to unravel when, without warning, Will’s golf shots begin landing in the rough, and he is struck with bouts of losing his balance and falling over. Just when Will appears doomed to share the fate of his father—whose suicide has haunted him his whole life—a mental hospital escapee named Allison might prove to be the only one who can save him. From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Moviegoer, these novels have been acclaimed by Time magazine for “irony, understatement, and compassion” and praised by the New York Times as “wonderfully good reading.”
Download or read book Symbol and Existence written by Walker Percy and published by . This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
