“The Kingdom of Absurdities,” the funniest novel ever written about graduate school, is now available in paperback on Amazon.com for $17.99. Click here or click on the Amazon link on the right to buy your copy today. Buy two copies and donate one to a miserable grad student. They might even thank you in their dissertation–unless they wind up ABD.
“Bruce Gatenby’s The Kingdom of Absurdities is an uneasy, startling, and outrageous read–it’s satire of the old variety, meaning it’s an impolite and necessary book in these times in which the American university has neutered itself. The fiefdoms are found in deans’ and chairs’ offices, where beknighted and tenured faculty protect their stations, while beneath them, an entire serfdom of graduate students, teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, and visiting instructors scramble to appease their lordships. The values of this kingdom? Orthodoxy. Safety. Conformity. Gatenby, in the tradition of Swift, Kafka, Orwell, and The Who, reminds us in this great comic novel that the new boss (in shiny post-structuralist garb) is very much the same as the old boss.”–Jim Brock, author of Nearly Florida and The Sunshine Mine Disaster