“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Randall Jarrell writes in his 1954 satire, “Pictures from an Institution.” In the novel, the university is home to two types: the asses and the industrialists. The former are dreamy, romantic; the latter, hard-nosed, pragmatic. Each of the campus novels below makes comedy out of these types, and warns us, as Jarrell did, “This institution’s drunk.”
The Amanda Cross Mysteries, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1964-2002)
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Coming soon:
- “Children of the Wolf,” by Abby Geni, is about a woman who, decades after her childhood of being raised like a Viking in rural Iowa, notices that the men in her Michigan town are mysteriously disappearing. It’s out September 15th.
- Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s “Heavy Cream,” centering on a sixteen-year-old girl abandoned by her mother in New York City, will be released on September 29th.
- Also out on the 29th is Robert Kolker’s nonfiction follow-up to “Hidden Valley Road”: “The Vanishing Family,” about the members of a nine-sibling family afflicted with a genetic mutation that causes a dramatic form of dementia.
- In small-screen news, Kit Harington is starring in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” out on MGM+ on September 6th. You have just enough time for a read (or a reread).
Our critic Becca Rothfeld is loving:
- “One of life’s greatest pleasures is selecting an author and reading her obsessively for months at a time,” Rothfeld notes. “I’ve been inhabiting the world of Edith Wharton since February, and, as far as I’m concerned, she can do no wrong. All her most famous books are exactly as good as everyone says they are, and several of her less famous books are better than most people care to tell you. Perhaps best of all is her 1917 novella, ‘Summer,’ which is so luscious and earthy that it reads almost like D. H. Lawrence. What could be better than a book that can be read in one long gasp and which blends Wharton’s biting social commentary with sublime flights about the body and the seasons? Not much!”
P.S. The Mary Oliver documentary is now streaming.
