Rating: 
Summary: Mix(ed bag) of humor, terror, and academic life
Review: Hynes offers up an at-times macabre blend of witchcraft, paranoia, and petty campus politics in three short stories/novellas. My conclusions are equally mixed.As one with no special love for cats, for me the first story was frustratingly driven by an irksome feline, although producing more comic relief than terror. The second story, very much an homage to Edgar Allen Poe (and acknowledged by the author to be based on another, earlier short story), became transparent early on, stripping the story of surprise and leaving the rest of the story to reveal the grisly details. The third work, remarkably woven into the first two, a la David Lodge, was the best of the three, although witchcraft had more to do with the results than any academic talent or story. Characters are well drawn and the context provides a realistic setting for the work: offices, conferences, professors' lodging, and campus landmarks. Hynes obviously has spent a lot of time on campus. Universities provide fertile ground for stories. Professors use their skills, especially in the humanities, to build their resumes and to poke fun at the foibles of academic life. And, given that there seems to be more time absorbed by sex and sordid affairs than by teaching or doing any research, writing anything at all must seem miraculous to the reader. But rare be the campus treatise that captures the life of an academic. "Luck Jim", "Groves of Academe" and others have been popular but quite unrealistically overdrawn. Richard Russo's deft "Straight Man" is the best and funniest university novel I've read. As an academic myself, the concept of "Perish" had a dark appeal and, while I read it quickly, I felt more relieved than rejuvenated at the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I hoped for.
Review: I found the characters in the book to be caricatures; and not very entertaining ones at that. The stories all smack of male mid-life crisis, a theme that rapidly becomes predictable. It is so easy to make fun of academics, but so hard to really wrestle with the contradictions of an intellectual life in a commercial culture. Plenty of easy satire here, but not much insight or true pathos.
Rating:
Summary: I really WANTED to like this book...
Review: I found this title on a list of recommended academic satire, and the premise sounded too promising to pass up. In similar books I've read recently (Moo, Straight Man, Small World), the level of writing skill is deliciously high - perhaps because the authors themselves teach the craft.
The influence of HP Lovecraft on the author is obvious, even before he drops a reference to Miskatonic University. The plots and execution of the tales, however, are disappointingly and distractingly clumsy, compared to those of Lovecraft and other writers of academe.
All three stories are told from the third person in roughly the same voice, they are predictable, and there are strange inconsistencies that an editor should have caught. In the first story there is a "teaching assistant" who is later referred to as a "postdoc." Which is he?
Overall, I'd have to recommend giving this book a pass, unless you are tolerant of thin plots, clumsy foreshadowing, and cardboard characters. Go re-read The Dunwich Horror, instead.
Rating: 
Summary: If Poe Had a PhD.
Review: If Edgar Allen Poe were a junior faculty member in a highly political department, this might be the kind of collection he'd write. James Hynes takes the old adage "publish or perish" to its most extreme and literal conclusion in these three novellas. In all three stories, a character's quest for academic credibility puts him or her in peril. Also in all three stories, the postmodern juts up against traditional academia, sometimes with gruesome results. This is a fast read, perfect for the chilly nights of late fall when the wind howls `round the window frames and your motivation to grade those midterm finals is waning. And unless someone at work is actively planning your death, it'll make you feel better about your own department politics, whatever they may be.
Rating:
Summary: If Poe Had a PhD.
Review: If Edgar Allen Poe were a junior faculty member in a highly political department, this might be the kind of collection he'd write. James Hynes takes the old adage "publish or perish" to its most extreme and literal conclusion in these three novellas. In all three stories, a character's quest for academic credibility puts him or her in peril. Also in all three stories, the postmodern juts up against traditional academia, sometimes with gruesome results. This is a fast read, perfect for the chilly nights of late fall when the wind howls 'round the window frames and your motivation to grade those midterm finals is waning. And unless someone at work is actively planning your death, it'll make you feel better about your own department politics, whatever they may be.
Rating: 
Summary: Academic Satire
Review: PUBLISH AND PERISH is a good read although I did not find it as chilling as some mysteries, including those by P.D. James and Patricia Cornwall. This book is scary in places and if you suffer from phobias (heights and closed in spaces) or find cruelty to animals offputting you might avoid it. Although the book contains three separate stories, they are interconnected and deconstructed so that bits of stories #1 and #2 are partly told in #3. Story #3 is by far the best, so don't put the book down until you read "Casting the Runes." Some academics may think excessive competition, back-stabbing, and treachery are found only in their world. As former member of both the corporate and political worlds (I worked for the U.S. Congress), and one who spent years in graduate school, I'd take academe any day. What makes offensive behaviour more noxious in an academic setting is that one believes educated people are more civilized and that they will behave better. They are not and they do not. One of my more interesting discoveries on leaving the academic world and learning to write text "ordinary" folks could read (elected officials and corporate executives) was that spilit infinitives don't really matter. The infinitive in Latin and the Romance languages cannot be split, although I labored for ages with the belief that the construction of sentences in English must follow Latin rules of grammar. I love Latin and studied it for many years, but one day I realized English is a living language and there are many ways to speak and write English. Hynes makes fun of the academic world and with good cause. Sadly, parts of it are in grave danger of becoming totally irrelevant. Not science and math, but the what we used to call the Liberal Arts. What is truth? My advisor said when you realize that truth is the great unknown you are becoming educated. Hynes stretches the truth with his tales of horror, or does he? As for me, I'm learning to read the runes.
Rating:
Summary: A-cute
Review: The three loosely (but ingeniously) connected novellas here all examine academic personalities and their lack of real power malignantly interacting with postmodern postures (YOU are situated in a constructed context, only I, haha, am free to criticize). Each story begins with allusions to postmodernism and to the trials of climbing the academic bureaucracy, but then veers off into more fictional terrors. All three stories reveal personal horrors (reminiscent of Poe's Telltale Heart, for example), layered twist upon twist, finally even a touch of eerie but by then devoutly wished-for supernatural revenge, but there are no unalloyed heroes here. It's the revenge of the despised "real world" upon the pretentious, particularly visible in the middle story. That is a profoundly disturbing but dead-on satire of "participant observation" and modern self-subverting cultural anthropology: a particularly obnoxious character intones "the proper study of anthropology is ...anthropologists"! Hynes's stories will be a delight for anyone who has had a brush with recent academic humanities, the perversion of cultural relativism as an observational tool into personal philosophies of paralysis, or "the other" as morally superior. The deft skewering here of the self-parodistic pontifications of postmodernism will make more "sense" if you are an academic, although you may recognize its arcane, obscurantist, humorless, nihilistic, and unprovable PC qualities. Hynes' obsession with sex is, I think, his own, but his macabre and humorous take on his vicious characters "engenders empowerment." The pb is nicely designed.
Rating:
Summary: Top Drawer Academic & High Brow Horror!
Review: This is the perfect Halloween gift for your favorite professor! In an amusing, off beat style, the author has written 3 terrific, creepy spoofs on slightly stuff shirted, slightly know it all, high level university professors. My favorite is the hallucinatory "99", something that really caught me off guard with its really creepy ending, where a very naive prof is seduced into a gothic horror. All three are beatifully and humorously written, with plenty of dark humor thrown in the brew! In short, give these 3 really unique tales a try, and you'll be more than glad you did!
Rating:
Summary: Perish the thought
Review: Three stories mildly interwoven. Good read but suspend your beliefs for the last story. Guess this would be considered an Academic mystery, although it's debatable. Someone needs to forewarn Mr. Hynes that his characterization of the overweight woman in the last story was gruesomely stereotypical. We wanted to like her, but with all that huffing and puffing...come on. Too much, Mr. Hynes.
Rating:
Summary: Scathing, funny, deliciously entertaining
Review: What fun! Hynes skewers academia so piercingly that I laughed out loud while reading his novellas. Some of the characters--especially characters in the first and third novellas--are loathsome, and it was fun to see them get their comeuppance. Hynes portrayal of academic conferences is so on-target that those in the academy should squirm. His twist on Poe's stories was clever, especially the riff on The Black Cat. The Cask of Amontillado is hinted at in spots of the second novella, but the allusions are weaker. Good summertime reading for anyone missing life in the university.
|
