Professor Dorie LaRue on Aloysius The Great by John Maxwell O’Brien

Professor Dorie LaRue

“Wickedly witty, Aloysius the Great combines incisive observations of present-day academic culture with a symphonic meta-frame of Joyce’s Ulysses to render a literal and literary landscape at once serious and sardonic. Joyceaninspired absurdity notwithstanding, this novel will be a delight to read by anyone versed or un-versed in the pleasures of Ulysses who enjoys the terrifyingly funny and the delightfully disturbing. John Maxwell O’Brien’s rich scholarly savvy is inextricably tethered to his talent for the comedic, and the result is nothing short of extraordinary.”

Dorie LaRue is the author of two novels, Resurrecting Virgil, (Backwaters Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2001) which won the Nebraska Prize for the Novel, The Trouble With Student Affairs (Artemis Press, 2019), three chapbooks of poetry, Seeking the Monsters (New Spirit Press 1993), The Private Frenzy, (Jazzbones Press,1992), In God’s Due Time: A Tribute to Mistress Rowlandson (Parousia Publishing, 2019), and a full length collection of poetry, Mad Rains (Kelsay Press, 2017). Her fiction and poetry and book reviews have appeared in The Southern Review, The American Poetry Review, and others. A twice recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, she lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and teaches writing at LSUS.