Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror - Hardcover

A typical line from Publish and Perish is the final thought of a character who's about to die in an oh-so-dreadful fashion: "This can't be happening to me. I've got tenure." Horror and humor together are always delightful, but rarely is the combination executed with such gleeful panache as in the three novellas that make up Publish and Perish. The humor is at the expense of American academics, from struggling postdocs to crusty full professors. The characters spout silly jargon, wrestle with their writing problems, preen their tender egos, and skewer their colleagues. Most are likeable: their vanity is so human, it's almost touching. But the horror isn't played for laughs; it's ruthless and chilling, in the tradition of Edgar A. Poe and M. R. James. As one New York Times reviewer writes, "Publish and Perish is an odd and exhilarating experience--the playfulness of post-modernism at its best somehow celebrating the urgent, earnest suspense of old-fashioned, cliff-hanging narrative."

Three witty, spooky novellas of satire set in academia--a world where Derrida rules, love is a "complicated ideological position," and poetic justice is served with a supernatural twist. In "Queen of the Jungle," young academics Paul and Elizabeth appear to enjoy a comfortable, tenure-track marriage, commuting between their jobs on either side of the Midwest. When Paul begins an affair with Kymberly, a graduate student, Elizabeth's cat Charlotte deviously arranges revenge for her absent owner and teaches Paul a lesson about infidelity that can't be learned at any university. "99" is the story of Gregory Eyck, a cultural anthropologist whose conference on the death of Captain Cook fails miserably and threatens his career. Eyck accepts an assignment in England with the BBC and travels to a mysterious town near Stonehenge where he finds himself an unwitting participant/observer in a bizarre pagan ritual. And in "Casting the Runes," a junior history professor named Virginia Dunning finds that she must defend not only her postmodernist ideology but also her very life from the greed and sorcery of an older, senior professor. The academic satire of Jane Smiley and David Lodge seasoned with pinches of Poe, M. R. James, and Stephen King, Publish and Perish is stylish, unsettling, and funny on every page.