Walker Percy

Explores human nature and presents insights on the self and its fears, sexuality, boredom, depression, and other aspects.

The Last Self-Help Book

Lost in the Cosmos

Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

A Novel

Love in the Ruins

Widower Will Barrett of Linwood, North Carolina, and Allison Vaught--two alienated souls both questioning their faith in God--together heal one another and return to a Christian community that rejects their methods of healing

The Second Coming

Dr. Tom More investigates a sudden outbreak of unusual behavior in Feliciana, Louisiana, and uncovers a criminal experiment to "improve" behavior patterns through the secret use of durgs in the local water supply

The Thanatos Syndrome

Confined in the Institute for Aberrant Behavior, Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, scion of a distinguished Southern family and disenchanted liberal lawyer, tells a psychiatrist-priest of his efforts to prove his wife's infidelity and his decision to begin life anew

Lancelot

"First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux"--T.p. verso.

How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

The Message in the Bottle

Winner of the 1962 National Book Award and one of Time magazine’s 100 Best English-Language Novels, Walker Percy’s debut The Moviegoer is an American masterpiece and a classic of Southern literature. Insightful, romantic, and humorous, it is the story of a young man’s search for meaning amid a shallow consumerist landscape. Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker, fills his days with movies and casual sex. His life offers him nothing worth retaining; what he treasures are scenes from The Third Man or Stagecoach, not the personal experiences he knows other people hold dear. On the cusp of turning thirty, however, something changes: At Mardi Gras, he embarks on a quest for some form of authentic experience. The consequences of Binx’s quest, on both himself and his unstable cousin Kate, prove outrageous, absurd, moving, and indelible. Featuring a new afterword by Richard Ford, this new edition of The Moviegoer cements Walker Percy’s place as a giant of American literature.

The Moviegoer

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.

Essays

Signposts in a Strange Land

Suzan Aral Akçora

Harabelerde aşk

Sinema Müdavimi

" Parachutez l'Etranger de Camus du côté de la Nouvelle-Orléans, donnez-lui beaucoup d'humour, faites de lui un cinéphile invétéré, et vous obtiendrez le portrait-robot du héros de ce roman, Binx Bolling. " André Clavel, L'Evénement du Jeudi.

Le Cinéphile

Shelby Foote

Collected letters offer a glimpse into a lifelong friendship--recording ambitions, artistic doubts, and personal problems

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Voker Persi

Igor Adžić

American classic in the mould of Catcher in the rye. Binx Bolling seems like an average guy. He goes to movies, he sells real estate, he chases his secretaries. The problem is, he really enjoys none of it. The happiest moment in his life came during the Korean war, when he was wounded. The experience shocked him out of the social facade that most of us spend our whole lives in, generally without knowing it's even there. He's been quietly, desperately searching for reality ever since.

Ljubitelj bioskopa

A distinguished novelist presents his observations on the cosmos, the self, the relationship between them, and present and prospective events, circumstances, and developments affecting that relationship

National Book Award Finalist: A lonely Southerner forges a surprising bond with a New York family in this “brilliant” novel by the author of The Moviegoer (Time). 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.

The Last Gentleman

Diagnosing the Modern Malaise

The Movie-goer

Two fascinating philosophical inquiries from the “dazzlingly gifted” New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer (USA Today). Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the Southern writer Walker Percy possessed “an intellectual range and rigor few American novelists can match” (The New York Times Book Review). In these two provocative works, Percy manages to be perceptive and playful as he more directly explores the philosophical foundations of his groundbreaking fiction. The Message in the Bottle: In these profound and passionate essays that “have a way of quickening the spirit and cleansing the sight,” Percy looks to language to answer the question of who we are as humans (The New Republic). He posits that the act of assigning meaning by naming things makes humans unique. Percy develops a theory of language through the example of Helen Keller being stimulated by the feel of water along with the sign for water, and explores questions such as why other animals don’t talk and why humans in technologically advanced, materially comfortable societies are so sad. “A delight . . . a pleasure to read.” —Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World Lost in the Cosmos: “Charming, whimsical, slyly profound,” Lost in the Cosmos is a one-of-a-kind mix of self-help parody and philosophical speculation (The New York Times). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Percy’s guide is a laugh-out-loud spin on a familiar genre that also pushes readers to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions, such as: “Why is it no other species but man gets bored?” and “Explain why Moses was tongue-tied and stagestruck before his fellow Jews but had no trouble talking to God.” “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke; a chapbook to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

A pair of profound dystopian novels from the “brilliantly breathtaking” New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer (The New York Times Book Review). Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the “dazzlingly gifted” Southern philosophical author Walker Percy wrote two vividly imagined satirical novels of America’s future featuring deeply flawed psychiatrist and spiritual seeker Tom More (USA Today). Love in the Ruins is “a great adventure . . . so outrageous and so real, one is left speechless” (Chicago Sun-Times), and its sequel The Thanatos Syndrome “shimmers with intelligence and verve” (Newsday). Love in the Ruins: The great experiment of the American dream has failed. The United States is on the brink of catastrophe. Can an alcoholic, womanizing, lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist really save a society speeding toward inevitable collapse? Dr. Thomas More certainly thinks so. He has invented the lapsometer, a machine capable of diagnosing and curing the country’s spiritual afflictions. If used correctly, the lapsometer could make anxiety, depression, alienation, and racism things of the past. But in the wrong hands, it could rapidly propel the nation into chaos. “A comedy of love against a field of anarchy . . . Percy is easily one of the finest writers we have.” —The New York Times Book Review The Thanatos Syndrome: In Percy’s “ingenious” sequel, Dr. Tom More, fresh out of prison after getting caught selling uppers to truck drivers, returns home to Louisiana, determined to live a simpler life (The New York Times). But when everyone in town starts acting strangely—from losing their sexual inhibitions to speaking only in blunt, truncated sentences—More, with help from his cousin, epidemiologist Lucy Lipscomb, takes it upon himself to investigate. Together, they uncover a government conspiracy poised to rob its citizens of their selves, their free will, and ultimately their humanity. “The Thanatos Syndrome has the ambition and purposefulness to take on the world, to wrestle with its shortcomings, and to celebrate its glories.” —The Washington Post Book World

Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome

This collection of interviews supplements Conversations with Walker Percy and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percy's life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general. Although this acclaimed author of The Moviegoer, Lancelot, and Love in the Ruins never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them. Although the questions he was asked almost invariably became predictable, he always managed to add an anecdote, an illustration, a topical reference, that would breathe new life into the responses he was making. The interviews in this collection show him at the height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy despised the posture of many modern self-proclaimed intellectuals who delight in cloaking ideas in jargon and abstraction. He always tried to express himself clearly and as free of reservations as possible. These interviews reflect that clarity. With this book readers will welcome yet more close encounters with him.

Walker Percy

Books

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