The Magic Christian

✍ Scribed by Terry Southern

• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Year: 1953;2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 355 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1453217312

✦ Synopsis

In this uproarious and wicked cult-classic, Southern skewers American greed and pomposity

Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire prankster, is rich enough to do whatever he likes. And what he likes is to carefully execute projects where he can cauterize by ridicule what the rest of the world ignores: complacency, greed, corruption, and idiocy. Determined to “make it hot for people,” Grand spends his billions staging a series of hilarious, sometimes bewildering stunts, lampooning along the way the American holy cows of money, status, power, beauty, media, and stardom. Concocting deliciously perverse mayhem, he throws a million one-hundred-dollar bills into an enormous vat of steaming offal, proving just what people will do for money, and he promotes a new silky shampoo that turns hair to wire and a deodorant that becomes a time-released stench-bomb. He inserts subliminally suggestive and perverse images into well-loved classic films, takes a howitzer on safari, and brings a panther to a kennel club dog show. His most elaborate adventure is an ultra-exclusive cruise aboard the S.S. Magic Christian, where elite passengers are treated to a series of madcap indignities.

The Magic Christian is a hilarious and savagely satiric view of American commercialism, rich in Southern’s deft handling of detail, dialogue, and delightful deviancy.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Terry Southern including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Review

“I started reading The Magic Christian and I thought I was going to go insane . . . It was an incredible influence on me.” —Hunter S. Thompson

“[The Magic Christian] is at once the most profoundly satiric and wildly comic account of our life and times in years.” —Nelson Algren

“Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation, and in The Magic Christian he surpasses Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, a work similarly inspired by conventional wisdom’s serene idiocy.” —Gore Vidal

“Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennet and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy.” —Joseph Heller

From the Inside Flap

One of the funniest, cruelest, and most savagely revealing books about American life ever written, The Magic Christian has been called Terry Southern's masterpiece.

Guy Grand is an eccentric billionaire--the last of the big spenders--determined to create disorder in the material world and willing to spare no expense to do it. Leading a life full of practical jokes and madcap schemes, his ultimate goal is to prove his theory that there is nothing so degrading or so distasteful that someone won't do it for money. In Guy Grand's world, everyone has a price, and he is all too willing to pay it.

A satire of America's obsession with bigness, toughness, money, TV, guns, and sex, The Magic Christian is a hilarious and wickedly original novel from a true comic genius.

"This is at once the most profoundly satiric and wildly comic account of our life and times in years."--Nelson Algren, The Nation

"Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation."--Gore Vidal

"Mr. Southern is wonderfully prodigal of comic ideas.... An enormously funny and satisfying satire, done with a great thrifty distinction."--The Spectator

"Terry Southern writes a mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose."--Norman Mailer

Terry Southern was the author of Flash and Filigree, Candy (with Mason Hoffenberg), Blue Movie, and Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. He was also an Oscar-nominated screenwriter whose credits include Easy Rider, Dr. Strangelove, and Barbarella, as well as an adaptation of The Magic Christian.

Library : General
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9781453217313