One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

author
Ken Kesey

uhh...
I don't really have to do this, right? Please tell me you people have read this book. One of the books on authority and power, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is uncannily prescient. Striking and creepy fifty years later. Well, if you haven't read it yet, just don't tell me, OK? Read it quickly now, and I'll never know the difference. I suppose we all have our shameful little secrets (War and Peace, for instance. Doo, doo, do...)

what the back of the book says
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s.
A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.

With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become an enduring favorite of readers.

some of the hype
"A glittering parable of good and evil." —The New York Times Book Review

"This is an allegory with a difference, the difference being found in the very method of composition, in the bi-tonal technique of terrible realism in conjunction with a profound and searching parable of government and the governed." —Richard A. Jelliffe, Chicago Tribune

"[A]s a work of fiction, for background, for story, for strong writing that holds harsh humor, anger and compassion, and, most of all, for the creation of Randle P. McMurphy, this is a first novel of special worth." —Rose Feld, New York Herald Tribune

"Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity." —Life

other things this author has written
Sometimes a Great Notion
Sailor Song
Kesey's Jail Journal
Kesey's Garage Sale
Demon Box
Caverns
The Further Inquiry (screenplay
Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs)
Twister (play)