A Contemporary Version of Stoner? Loner by Teddy Wayne

September 13, 2016 – vanityfair.com

Loner Author Teddy Wayne on Tackling the Campus Novel and Male Privilege
The author discusses the dark social forces that influenced his latest book.
BY MIKE SACKS

“Vanity Fair contributor and New York Times columnist Teddy Wayne has a new campus novel, Loner (Simon & Schuster), out today, just in time for back-to-school season. Wayne’s third book follows David Federman, an alienated Harvard freshman who soon becomes infatuated with Veronica, a glamorous, sophisticated Manhattanite in his dorm.

What begins as a wry coming-of-age story soon spirals into a dark, disturbing portrait of obsession and an examination of class and gender politics.”

More:

http://kdlg.org/post/first-year-college-student-finds-himself-outclassed-loner#stream/0

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/arts_and_entertainment/hammack-loner-represents-modern-college-life/article_ed40ec9c-8f62-11e6-8e10-ff014ed49d2a.html

Christopher J. Yates’ Black Chalk

August 20, 2015 – The Washington Post

‘Black Chalk’ review: A school game turns deadly by Dennis Drabelle

“A circle of bright college friends who feed on one another’s cleverness and trump one another’s insults until the steady diet of cynicism ends in tragedy — this is the stuff of two fine first novels: Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” (1992) and, now, Christopher J. Yates’s “Black Chalk.” Yates’s characters are even wittier than Tartt’s, but then, as undergraduates at Oxford University, they would be, wouldn’t they?”  

Robin Kirman’s Bradstreet Gate

August 4, 2015 – USA Today

Campus novel fizzles out of the ‘Gate’ by Patrick Ryan

“Graduating from the school of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch), Robin Kirman barely ekes out a diploma.

With her debut novel, Bradstreet Gate (** out of four), Kirman has drawn comparisons to Tartt, whose 1992 first outing A Secret History followed a band of Ivy League students enraptured by a charismatic academic. Similarly, Bradstreet excavates the secrets and thorny histories of three Harvard undergrads and their professor, set against the backdrop of a campus murder that muddies their allegiances.”

Michael Hingston’s The Dilettantes

“Back in April, the Guardian called for the death of the campus novel, claiming the genre has become too crowded, too well-trodden, with writers like Chad Harbach, Bret Easton Ellis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, and Don DeLillo all shoving each other on the way to the literary rez caf. But six months ago the Guardian didn’t have its hands on Georgia Straight reviewer Michael Hingston’s satire The Dilettantes, a very funny debut that explores a whole, ridiculous new facet of the academic world: a university newspaper.”

 

September 12, 2013 – Edmonton Journal

Campus novel at top of its class by Karen Virag

September 27, 2013 – The Globe and Mail

Michael Hingston’s Novel Can’t Quite Transcend the Irony It’s Supposed to be Skewering by Emily M. Keeler

October 2, 2013 – straight.com

Michael Hingston takes on the college campus with The Dilettantes by Jennifer Croll

The End?

2006

The End of the Campus Novel?

2011

Still the End of the Campus Novel?

2013 – The Guardian

Last rites for the campus novel by John Dugdale

“Though currently very much on-trend, the campus novel is now approaching retirement age.”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/apr/01/last-rites-campus-novel

About that back-to-school nostalgia

“Even when you have finished your schooling, it’s hard to forget the gut-churning excitement, the strange objectless yearnings, that accompany the beginning of the academic year. This is as true, I think, for kindergartners as it is for those completing their final year of college (graduate school, by all reports, is another, far more hellish story). But it is perhaps most intense during our undergraduate days. This mingled ease and pain attains to a special plangency in America, where the past, perhaps because we have so little of it, becomes mythic almost immediately, which I proffer as a reason for the preponderance of American books among those mentioned below. Or you can blame my deep-seated jingoistic urges […] here are eight of the very best books providing the drug of nostalgia we all crave, now that we’re sliding down—as Tom Lehrer once sang—the razor blade of life.”

8/13/2012 – The Daily Beast

Must-Read College Novels: From “Lucky Jim” to “Pnin” by Sam Munson

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/13/must-read-college-novels-from-lucky-jim-to-pnin.html

“Indulging in some late-August back-to-school nostalgia, the Daily Beast put together a list of “Must-Read College Novels” ranging from Kingsley Amis’Lucky Jim to John Williams’ Stoner. As a fan of college, books, and college books, I thought I’d work up a supplementary list: the principal ingredients that no college novel can do without.”

8/27/2012, The Airship

Back to School: A List of Essentials for the College Novel by Kayla Blatchley

http://airshipdaily.com/blog/back-school-list-essentials-college-novel

Boring, repetitive, elitist…

April 5, 2012 – idioland.com

The Great American Campus Novel Yawn

http://idioland.com/culture/great-american-campus-novel-yawn/

“The best campus novels have a comic, rueful touch […]”

“I’ve always been drawn to novels set in the academy. I like the parochial closed world in which incompatible people are forced to come to terms with one another. I like the relatively high tolerance for oddity and the relatively low threat of physical violence. I like characters who speak in complete sentences, use lofty vocabulary and sprinkle their repartee with literary references.”

September 6, 2011, The Wall Street Journal

Back to School by Cynthia Crossen

David Lodge on campus novels

source: http://randomhouseindia.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/david.jpg

September 24, 2010 11:34 pm, Financial Times

“The campus novel emerged as higher education expanded and novelists increasingly took day jobs in universities. Inherently comic and satirical, it is focused on the lives of academic staff rather than their students, and explores the gap between the high ideals of the institution and the human weaknesses of its members.”

The List: Five of the best campus novels

David Lodge on Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin

Other top tens, top fives etc.:

Jeffrey Moore’s top 10 campus novels:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jul/03/bestbooks.fiction

10 Classic Campus Novels:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/04/10-classic-campus-novels_n_857756.html#s274149&title=Gaudy_Night

Literature of the campus:

http://theconcordian.com/2013/09/articulate-literature-of-the-campus/

Top 5 Campus Novels Written by Women by Jane Bradley:

http://forbookssake.net/2013/07/05/top-five-campus-novels-written-by-women/