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Saturday, December 21, 2019
Happy Holidays - Take a Break from Research with Fiction about Us
Professors deserve some downtime too... As longtime readers of this blog know, my favorite type of fiction is the one close to home - the academic or campus novel. So I liked finding this list which includes some of my favorites (William's Stoner; Lodge's Trilogy; Sittenfield; Chabon; Rooney) and some new titles I need to order. Enjoy and if you stumble upon some new great academic novels please SHARE!
I am in the middle of Richard Rousseau's new book Chances Are, and it is about the formative college experience, but not a true academic novel like his amazing Straight Man. I also so want to find something that would match the four Napoli books of Elena Ferrante, which at some point become about a professor's life.
Posted by Orly Lobel on December 21, 2019 at 02:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
update: I am midway thru The Secret History which is number one on the list - it is good, well-written, a bit sophomoric, but not what I think of an academic novel - it is a campus novel - about college students, which is different from academic novels about life as an academic and in academia
Posted by: Orly Lobel | Jan 3, 2020 2:13:12 AM
Julie Schumacher's "Dear Committee Members" is laugh-out-loud clever and inspired. Unfortunately I found her sequel "The Shakespeare Requirement" to be unreadable, so beware.
Posted by: Jeff Lipshaw | Dec 24, 2019 3:35:05 PM
thanks for all these - i am adding to my list! happy holidays
Posted by: Orly Lobel | Dec 24, 2019 12:48:19 PM
A few more:
J.I.M. Stewart wrote a quintet set in Oxford called "A Staircase in Surrey." The first is The Gaudy (the first of the books, but the second chronologically).
Michael Innes, Death at the President's Lodging, the first in his Appleby series, which opens with the murder of the president of St. Anthony's College. Incidentally, Michael Innes is the pseudonym of. . . .wait for it. . . .J.I.M. Stewart.
Posted by: Ellen Wertheimer | Dec 21, 2019 4:04:32 PM
Thank you for posting this! I love novels about academia and boarding schools.
How about a few more:
An Educated Death, by Kate Flora. A mystery that begins with the drowning of a young woman who is a student at a New England boarding school.
The Masters, by C.P. Snow. A novel about the selection of the next master of a Cambridge University college that begins as the current master is dying. This is one of the novels in the Strangers and Brothers series.
The Imogen Quy series, by Jill Paton Walsh. Detective stories starring a Cambridge University nurse as the detective, most of which are set in college.
Posted by: Ellen Wertheimer | Dec 21, 2019 3:01:12 PM
Not necessarily a recommendation, but see this on the rise of the "Adjunctroman": https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191216-DisgustingCampusNovel
Posted by: E | Dec 21, 2019 9:59:11 AM
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