I spent 36 years on the MIT faculty, an exhilarating stint in the academic fast lane. For 25 of those years, I served on my department’s promotion and tenure committee. I was also a journal editor, a book-series editor, and I ran technical conferences, just the kinds of things one expects from someone in my position. Along the way, I started reading novels about the academic life. Finding many of them wanting (too silly, too dysfunctional), I decided that after my retirement, I would write my own novels, presenting a realistic insider’s picture of life in the academic fast lane and the familial stresses that can result.
While many campus novels are farces, set in dysfunctional departments at poorly run schools, One Man’s Purpose tells a serious story within a first-rate university, run by smart, competent people, where in spite of everyone’s best efforts, things can still go horribly wrong. One Man’s Purpose is the first leg of what has grown into The Martin Quint Trilogy.
Martin Quint, Professor of Engineering at the Cambridge Technology Institute (think MIT), is charged with mentoring Katarina Rodriguez through the tenure process. The tenure case turns out to be razor thin. The more Martin works on helping Kat, the more jealous his pregnant wife becomes. When confidential information about the case turns up on the internet, the simmering kettle explodes.
I prefer a combination of poignancy and humor over the silly farces that are typical of many campus novels. While there is, indeed, plenty of dysfunction at the university depicted in this amazing novel, there is rich poignancy and hysterical, even farcical humor in the way the protagonist deals with his frustrations (he’s unable to get a departmental budget commitment from upper administration, and his stunts are downright funny), plus intense emotional engagement as these frustrations spill over into his home life. Exactly the kind of novel I enjoy. So many things ring true.
Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. Soon to Be an Original Series on AMC Starring Bob Odenkirk.
William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character—he is a born anarchist—and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.
In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have…
Pnin, a Russian émigré teaching at a not-wonderful college, is a remarkably endearing protagonist. I would welcome him into my home. Constantly swimming upstream, he is resolute yet humble. He takes on life in America with thoughtful determination and becomes victorious even in defeat. A stellar individual. Nabokov’s deftness with the English language enriches this short and highly accessible novel.
Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.
Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.
Jim, the protagonist, is swimming upstream in a highly dysfunctional academic department. The first time I read it, I was not amused. The second time, and then the third time, I got hooked. This is a character study about surprising inner strength emerging from the shards of distressingly bad events, both academic and personal. Jim is indeed lucky at the end, but his luck is clearly deserved.
Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim was published in 1954, and is a hilarious satire of British university life. Jim Dixon is bored by his job as a medieval history lecturer. His days are only improved by pulling faces behind the backs of his superiors as he tries desperately to survive provincial bourgeois society, an unbearable…
The academic life provides plenty of opportunity for hanky-panky, and this delightful novel, in which two distinguished professors participate in an exchange program involving more than academic responsibilities, has plenty of it. The first leg of a wonderful academic-life trilogy, this novel is anchored in the self-importance that can eat at the edges, even the core, of successful faculty members.
When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...
Over the course of my career, I have written hundreds of letters of recommendation—graduate school admissions, faculty hiring, faculty promotions and tenure, election to the National Academy of Engineering—the works. Writing such letters is serious business. What hilarious relief this book provides! It is an exquisite parody of several dozen archetypal recommendation letters, demonstrating both with poignancy and humor the kind of damage that a less-than-woke writer can do. I loved it.
Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary."
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he…
Charley Byrne isn’t really living. She hunkers down in her apartment above the bookstore she manages, until quirky activist Xander Wallace lures her out of social exile with the prospect of friendship and romance. Charley joins Xander’s circle of diverse friends and thrives, even leaving her comfort zone to join protests in a city struggling with social justice ills.
But the new friendships bring back-to-back betrayals that threaten the bookstore—Charley’s haven—and propel her into a dangerous depression, in a stark reminder that friendship has the power to destroy as well as save lives. Can her friends save the store? And Charley?
"A beautifully crafted story of friendship and self-discovery set amidst the harsh realities of today's world. Superb!" -Eileen O'Finlan, author of Erin's Children
Charley Byrne isn't really living. At age 29, she hunkers down in her apartment above the bookstore she manages, afraid of a 7-year curse. Then quirky activist Xander Wallace lures her out of social exile with the prospect of friendship and romance. Charley joins Xander's circle of friends diverse in their heritage, race, gender and sexual orientation. She thrives, even leaving her comfort zone to join protests in a city struggling with social justice ills.
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