Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror

A typical line from Publish and Perish is the final thought of a character who's about to die in an oh-so-dreadful fashion: "This can't be happening to me. I've got tenure." Horror and humor together are always delightful, but rarely is the combination executed with such gleeful panache as in the three novellas that make up Publish and Perish. The humor is at the expense of American academics, from struggling postdocs to crusty full professors. The characters spout silly jargon, wrestle with their writing problems, preen their tender egos, and skewer their colleagues. Most are likeable: their vanity is so human, it's almost touching. But the horror isn't played for laughs; it's ruthless and chilling, in the tradition of Edgar A. Poe and M. R. James. As one New York Times reviewer writes, "Publish and Perish is an odd and exhilarating experience--the playfulness of post-modernism at its best somehow celebrating the urgent, earnest suspense of old-fashioned, cliff-hanging narrative."