Description

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Oddball sexuality, acts of perversion, and out-of-order behavior from the acclaimed Jamaican author of The Lunatic and Dog War.

How funny is this social satire? Akashic Books’s pledge to our readers: Laugh out loud at least once or your money back. Seriously.

“This book is laugh-out-loud, hold-your-side funny. You don’t even realize the message in this poignant and philosophical story until you stop laughing . . . Winkler is a wonderful writer with a sharp pen and amazing pedagogy.” —Today (NBC), “Cover to Cover”

Baps, a Jamaican shopkeeper, drops dead unexpectedly one Saturday morning and finds himself being transported to heaven via a crowded minibus. Everything about Paradise that he had been raised to expect and believe, he finds to be utterly and completely wrong. For one thing, Paradise suspiciously resembles Jamaica. Baps has much to learn: about the afterlife, about God, about the distortions of established religion, and ultimately about humanity . . . With his characteristic outrageousness, and with more than a hint of postmodern playfulness, Winkler defies taboos and subverts conventional thinking in this entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately uplifting novel.

About the Author

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ANTHONY C. WINKLER (1942–2015) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and is widely recognized as one of the island’s finest exports. After being expelled from Cornwall College for refusing to submit to corporal punishment (which entailed being beaten with a cane), he eventually made his way to California where he attended Citrus College and California State University, earning a BA and MA in English. His first published novel, The Painted Canoe, received critical acclaim and was followed by The Lunatic, The Great Yacht Race, The Duppy, Crocodile, Dog War, God Carlos, and The Family Mansion, among others. Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer, his autobiography, was published in 2008. His writing credits also include film scripts and plays.

Praise For…

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Not many books come with a money-back guarantee, but publisher Akashic Books is so sure that readers of Anthony C. Winkler’s The Duppy will laugh out loud, it will refund people’s money if they do not. Luckily for Akashic, safer bets are hard to find.

— Hipster Book Club

The comic and philosophical narrative is stimulating, and the critique of religion is brought to a clever and positive resolution. Recommended.
— Library Journal

The Duppy is like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. stringing up Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven like a piñata and beating it with a stick.

— Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Duppy is the most laugh-out-loud funny novel I’ve read in years . . . The book blends postmodern metafiction with folklorist regionalism in a raucous contemporary satire of the wages of sin.

— Stop Smiling