In a musty dorm room at an elite college in upstate New York sleeps Conrad Greyman. He sleeps all the time, in fact. Conrad is a casualty of postmodern malaise and bears hidden wounds he doesn’t understand.
‘Mardi Gras’ tells the fantastic story of Conrad’s spontaneous trip to the great Southern festival. He finds there, amid the infernal chaos of neon lights and Bourbon, a chance for unlikely redemption. Conrad’s journey through the mad streets of New Orleans becomes a modern hero-quest, and New Orleans an epic landscape. Conrad’s adventure is populated by holy fools who come to his aid, menacing frat boys, magical beads, and unadulterated American decadence. In the balance hangs the fate of an inward-looking soul trying to make his way through a fractured, carnivalistic world.
Conrad’s adventure comes to reveal many of the shallownesses and inequities of American social life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the chronicles of the Beats did for their generation, and ultimately offers a hard-won but simple answer for transcending them.
Purchase as Ebook
Purchase in Print
(sometimes one can find a few relatively inexpensive print copies still left through Amazon)
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