Sex, Blackmail, Theft, Treachery, Murder and...Scholarship?

"Higher Learning" is a wickedly funny dissection of folly in the groves of academe. Much more than a murder mystery laced with sex and intrigue, Marianne Shapiro's novel is a funny and yet withering satire on the foibles and hypocrisies of the contemporary American academy.

(PRWEB) July 8, 2005 -- From the battlegrounds of World War II to Redfern University's more-than-a-little-cracked ivory towers, it's all part of the riotous satire "Higher Learning," by Marianne Shapiro.

Everything's fair game for the author's sharp pen -- political correctness, faculty relations, student activism, the cult of celebrity and contemporary poetry, just for starters. Higher Learning is a page-turner, now available for uproarious reading!

In the lively tradition of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and David Lodge's "Small World and Changing Places," "Higher Learning" sends-up sex, blackmail, theft, treachery, political correctness, murder mysteries and scholarship.

Set at Ivy League "Redfern University," the story turns on the murder of a student, Selena Fenn, whose grandfather is a prominent member of the Redfern Board of Trustees. Chief suspects are assorted lunatic Redfern faculty members; Keith Chambers, the special assistant to Redfern's president, Grigol ("Chuck") Chavadze; and Selena's lesbian roommate, Hilary Slocombe.

As two harried police detectives struggle to cut through University red tape and duplicity to solve the murder, the chaos is amplified by purloined letters, incriminating papers dating back to World War II, a flourishing on-campus prostitution ring, faculty intrigue, the establishment of a politically correct curriculum and a list of Forbidden Words. At stake are millions of dollars, control of a new campus center, and the reputations of high-powered campus movers-and-shakers.

Will scandal destroy the University? Will revelations of past indiscretions ruin careers and lives? Will the police unmask the murderer? We won't spoil the fun by telling you!

Published on 18 May 2005 by BookSurge (http://www.booksurge.com/author.php3?accountID=GPUB02803&affiliateID=A000940), and is available through Booksurge and Amazon.

Praise for Higher Learning:

"I am writing to thank you for that delightful, scathing, and oh-so-true roman à clef, Higher Learning. I have been telling everyone I know about it… this novel warmed my heart with its cheerfully unsentimental skewering of some that is best and all that is worst about academe. Marianne doesn't miss a trick: the academic in-fighting, the departmental hierarchy, the pretentious jargon of multiculturalists, the insidious "arguments" of postmodernism, the unprincipled careerists, the spoiled and disaffected undergraduates, the harried and terrified grad students, the political overlapping with fundraising, the few, small islands of loyalty and sanity amid faddism, and the near-perfect inability of anyone to acknowledge aloud the truth of what was happening around them. It's all there." Michael Gleason, Millsaps College

"A laugh-out-loud read." Karen Orren, UCLA

"A wickedly funny dissection of folly in the groves of academe." Stephen Werner, UCLA

"Much more than a murder mystery laced with sex and intrigue, Marianne Shapiro's novel is a funny and yet withering satire on the foibles and hypocrisies of the contemporary American academy. A must-read for all college students, professors, and administrators -- especially those who fancy themselves politically correct." Michael Cabot Haley, University of Alaska Anchorage

“Marianne Shapiro's Higher Learning is a highly original view of academic life, more brilliantly satirical than, say, the novels of David Lodge. Written by one of the world's greatest Dante scholars, it is a roman a clef and a detective novel. Every line is barbed with wit -- it's simply bloody funny !!" - G. J. Barker-Benfield, State University of New York at Albany

About the Author:

Marianne Shapiro (née Goldner) was born on April 14, 1940, in Budapest (Hungary), and immigrated to the United States at the age of 3. She attended New York public schools in Manhattan, including the High School of Music and Art, and graduated from Barnard College. She was a Fulbright student at the Universities of Rome and Florence and received graduate degrees from Harvard and Columbia University.

Besides her extensive published scholarship in medieval, Renaissance, and comparative literature, Marianne Shapiro was an accomplished classical pianist and linguist (French, Italian, Latin, Old Provençal, German, Russian) and had a detailed knowledge of art history, particularly the European Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Marianne Shapiro died on June 3, 2003, in Manchester, Vermont.

Other Books by Marianne Shapiro:

Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante (University Press of Kentucky, 1975)

Hierarchy and the Structure of Tropes (Indiana University, 1976)

Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina (University of Minnesota Press, 1980)

The Poetics of Ariosto (Wayne State University Press, 1988)

Figuration in Verbal Art (Princeton University Press, 1988)

De vulgari eloquentia, Dante's Book of Exile (University of Nebraska Press, 1990)

Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul (St. Martin's Press, 1998)

From the Critic's Workbench: Essays in Literature and Semiotics (Peter Lang, 2005)

Contact: Michael Shapiro

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