Lord of the Barnyard Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt

Praise for Lord of the Barnyard

"Lord of the Barnyard is an arctic blast of fresh air and a far cry from the formulaic writing so prevelant in much contemporary fiction . . . [a] memorable, ambitious debut." -San Francisco Chronicle

"An exuberant bildungsroman . . . outrageous." -The New Yorker

"A vulgar, reckless, uncalled-for, hammer-your-knee-off funny tour de force . . . John Kaltenbrunner . . . could have stepped out of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." -The Seattle Times

"A Rabelaisian explosion of language . . . Lord of the Barnyard is not only a stylistic tour de force but also a baroque novel reminiscent of Celine, John Kennedy Toole and Saul Bellow." -Jean-Gerald Charbonneau, The Detroit Free Press

"Dizzying, dazzling debut novel . . . a bighearted lyrical fairy tale. . . . Egolf's prose, bursting with near-manic energy, is that surreal combination of detached, pseudo-objective research and small-town stories as truth, and requires a wonderful suspension of disbelief." -David Daley, The Hartford Courant

"A bold and original debut. . . . His brilliantly warped, pedal-to-the metal vision has the obsessive quirkiness of a Pynchon, the rough-and-tumble bad-assness of a Daniel Woodrell and the more malignant touch of the Faulkner who created the Snopeses." -Mark Luce, Salon Magazine

"A darkly comic tale of lawlessness and brigandage . . . with a ferocity reminiscent of Twain . . an impressive expression of the indomitable human spirit." -Leopold Froehlich, Playboy

"Wildly imaginative first novel . . . a spectacular fusion of the grotesque and the epic." -Lev Grossman, Time Out New York

"A monumental debut novel . . . joins the ranks of other master-plots of the whimsical and absurd. Egolf's storytelling is compelling, and his rich palette of similes and metaphors makes this an entertaining and disturbing portrait of small-town America." -Library Journal (starred review)

"A wild ride of a book ...possessed of a manic, epic energy . . . robust and intoxicating prose." -Publishers Weekly

"A satirical mock-up of Middle America and, at least in part, a boldly imagined allegory of the struggles of American labor. . . . Egolf has a real subject and the ability and will to write about it passionately." -Kirkus Reviews

"A wonderfully strange book . . . carrying a large amount of thematic freight. There are shades of Pynchon and Lawrence Norfolk, but Egolf's world is stamped with his own vision. It is a torrential, frenzied and giddy world . . . achingly funny and tragic." -Literary Review (London)

"A work of substance, significance and originality . . . its pages reverberate with mutant sociolects, odd concatenations, myth, drama and a ludic zest . . . it owes a discernible debt to Steinbeck and Faulkner, a more palpable one to John Kennedy Toole." -The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Sometimes comical, sometimes tragical, but always intense." -De Morgen (Belgium)

"This astonishing first novel by an American author introduces a singular new literary voice who is lord of his own universe. Lord of the Barnyard is a novel that, from the beginning, aims for the marrow." -El Pais (Spain)

"A sensational debut . . . the most remarkable novel I read this year." -NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)

"Homeric, hallucinatory. . . a Biblical apocalypse orchestrated by a rene- gade that could have come straight out of a novel by C"line . . . A revelation." -Cosmopolitan (France)

"An outrageous, lyrical, jubilant epic . . . Without question, in Egolf's soul one can detect the spirit of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, J. P. Donleavy's iconoclastic Ginger Man, Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, and John Kennedy Toole's big comic imbecile of oedipal fury . . . Lord of the Barnyard is a tornado of almost Biblical proportion." -Le Monde (France)

"In a vocabulary that is image-rich, imaginative, invented, twisted, a luxuriant prose, crazy like a river in flood, the legend of John Kaltenbrunner carries us all on his journey and leaves us, at the end of the story, buzzing and entranced to have made the acquaintance . . . of a great new future for American literature." -Le Figaro (France)