My Favorite Campus Novels

I just taught this utter masterpiece in a private class on Ishiguro, and was newly bowled over. Supposedly privileged children at an elite school slowly uncover and reveal to us a darker, more sinister aspect to their existence in a novel that is at once eerie, wrenching, prescient, and a timeless story of education, growing up, innocence and experience, memory and mortality.

This is a brilliant satire of grad student life that I first read along with my younger son, James, when it was required reading for the senior class at his high school. James loved it as much as I did!

A wonderfully bizarre novel set in large part in a girls boarding school in the town of Villette (based on Brussels). The narrator, Lucy Snowe, is deeply unreliable, the goings-on are mysterious, even sinister, and the story is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a tutor and a teacher, a student and a mentee.

My sister and I read this novel in galley a month or so before it came out in 2005 and became flat-out obsessed. I'm happy to report that when I taught it to a book group of middle school girls a few years ago, they all fell in love with it just as my sister and I had. Prep holds up!

I first read this sequel to Little Women over Christmas at my grandmother's house in suburban Illinois, and in some ways, I loved it even more than its illustrious precursor. Jo March and her husband Fritz Bhaer have used Aunt March's bequest to found a school that their own sons and a slew of endearing boys, some paying students, some orphans on scholarship, attend. Like Jo, the book is rollicking, tender, and bursting with intelligence and vibrant warmth.

I read this novel the year it came out, which was also the year I moved from Yale to Vassar as an assistant professor of English and taught a class on gothic literature. The Horned Man, about a professor at an upstate New York liberal arts college who finds himself haunted by spectres both literal and figurative and embroiled in a Kafka-esque murder plot, is so smart about academia, so scary, and so good!

What can I say, it's hilarious and you should believe the hype!

Susan is one of my favorite writers, and this novel puts a hot, queer spin on the eros of education. Choi's prose is at once pellucid and charged with feeling as she effortlessly riffs on the literature of desire and its discontents from Shakespeare to the present.

A novel I'd heard rhapsodically praised for years by readers I trust. I finally read it about four years ago and have since taught it three times. It's somber yet searching, exquisitely written, heartrending.

My mom was Tom's agent for most of his career and I spoke and emailed with him extensively as he worked on the book. We'd both done PhDs at Yale and I was an English professor at Yale and Vassar while he was writing the book; he and I talked about the novel's engagement with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I was thrilled to see that a new edition with an introduction by one of my favorite contemporary critics, Merve Emre, will be published soon by McNally Jackson. I've been raving about Merve to my Mom, who recommended Merve to Lorin Stein at McNally Jackson, so it all feels very full circle.