Foreign Affairs | What Do I Read Next?

  • Lurie's novel The War between the Tates (1974) is an academic novel that takes place on the campus of the fictional Corinth University, which is based on Cornell University, where Lurie teaches. The novel treats in satiric fashion the collapsing marriage of Brian Tate, a professor of political science, and his wife, Erica.
  • British author David Lodge writes exceedingly funny academic novels. In Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), English and American academic life are subjected to hilarious satire when English academic Philip Swallow of the University of Rummidge swaps places for half a year with American scholar Morris Zapp of State University of Euphoria.
  • Henry James's novel The Ambassadors (1903) shows the interaction of American innocence with sophisticated European society. Lambert Strether is sent by a rich widow to Paris to persuade the woman's son, who has taken up with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, to return home to the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts.
  • Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997) is a hilarious adventure in the neurotic weekend of an interim chairman of English at a struggling U.S. university, at which administrators are laying off tenured faculty and shifting curriculum from traditional subjects, such as English literature, to more marketable applied subjects, such as technical and computer courses.