Interim is a "campus" novel, which means it takes place on a college campus. The main character is an English professor who takes over as an assistant dean in his college. The book is serious and absurd about what happens in universities today: administrators push paper and come up with quasi-corporate speak and ideas to "run" their business and keep their "customers" (students and their parents) happy. The problem is, the customers don't really know what they want besides a good-paying job and the administrators don't know what they are doing. The faculty, who are the centered of the system, get the shaft.
What if, one shining summer day, a friend-in-need asks you to take a job you don’t want, aren’t qualified for, and will just plain hate? If you’re Rob Roy, Professor of English at STATE University, and your sweet son—gone sullen under his headphones—is about to incur some hefty college costs, you say fine, dammit, and become Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities, Interim.
It turns out Rob can do some good, if he can head off the nefarious plans of unctuous archrival, Professor Steve Klutz, who’s got something cooking with STATE’s online education. Along the way, though, he’ll need to…
This novel traces a man's entire life in about 150 pages. The ups and downs and the changes over the course of the 20th Century. It's a little gem of a book, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins.
'Heart-rending and heart-warming . . . for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel' Jim Crace
Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more,…
This is a book of brief paragraphs and aphorisms. It can be picked up and read anywhere and give you a thought you've not had before. In fact, many of the ideas will challenge your thinking. Weil was a wild character and this book is posthumous, but don't let that stop you from enjoying the stunning sentences. Examples:
Human life is impossible. But it is only affliction which makes us feel this.
To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.
We are drawn to a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.
Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of…
Poetry: A Survivor's Guide has earned high praise from students, teachers, and readers from around the globe for its playful sincerity and idiosyncratic humor and for its approach to a subject both loved and feared. Updated and expanded, including six new sections, the second edition probes a range of strategies for inspiring students and aspiring poets on the ways poetry relates to their own lives. These include the delights and pitfalls of individual meditation, the complications of identity and appropriation, and the uses and utility of poetry as a tool of social change.
