The Moviegoer

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Walker Percy

Vintage, New York, 1998; originally published 1961, English

Fiction

ISBN: 9780375701962

From the Publisher. The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature. Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

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Margie Ruddick

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Brought to life a city and landscape I had never been in—and the people in it—so vividly that when I visited New Orleans for the first time I felt I had always known it. Best sidewise revelation and questioning of faith (“extreme unction”).

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