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The manic, painfully funny story of a town’s dirty laundry and a garbagemen’s strike that lets it all hang out. hailed as “a harsh, strange brew, disarming in its richness” and “a fecund and captivating work, distinguished by its color, exuberance, cohesion and inventiveness.” (Times Literary Supplement)
Lord of the Barnyard begins with the death of a woolly mammoth in the last Ice Age and concludes with a greased-pig chase at a funeral in the modern-day Midwest. In the interim there are two hydroelectric dam disasters, fourteen tavern brawls, one shoot-out in the hills, three cases of probable arson, a riot in the town hall, a lone tornado, a coven of Methodist crones, an encampment of Appalachian crop thieves, six renegade coal-truck operators, an outraged mob of factory rats, a dysfunctional poultry plant, and one autodidact goat-roping farm boy by the name of John Kaltenbrunner.
Lord of the Barnyard is a brilliantly comic tapestry of a Middle America populated by assembly-line drones and poultry-plant neck-slicers, measuring into shot glasses the fruits of years of quiet desperation on the factory floor. It is a plea for nothing more than the minimal respect owed to the most forgotten blue-collar workers of the global proletariat, and a word of warning that respect denied can go much farther than postal.
An unforgettable story delivered at dizzy heights of linguistic invention, Lord of the Barnyard introduces a new, uniquely American literary voice who has already won acclaim around the world.
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)
Tristan Egolf (1971-2005) was born in Spain and resided in Philadelphia; Paris; rural Indiana; Vienna; Oxford, Mississippi; Amsterdam; New York City; London; and New Orleans. He published two novels during his life, Lord of the Barnyard and Skirt and the Fiddle. At the time of his death in May 2005 he was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a city with a sizeable Amish population. In addition to Kornwolf he had recently written a rock opera and recorded a CD with Doomed to Obscurity, his Philadelphia-based band.