The College on the Hill


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The College on the Hill


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City On A Hill


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Traub relates the daily struggles of men and women trying to gain an education against the odds at the City College of New York, telling the story of the college's difficult present against the backdrop of its 150-year history. Students battle the cultural and economic forces that perpetuate inner-city poverty while the college that produced eight Nobel Laureates now tries to prepare survivors of the public school system for college-level work. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The Nix


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Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction A New York Times 2016 Notable Book Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book A Slate Top Ten Book NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The Nix is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix explores—with sharp humor and a fierce tenderness—the resilience of love and home, even in times of radical change. It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn’t seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help. To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.




The Brown Reader


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“To be up all night in the darkness of your youth but to be ready for the day to come…that was what going to Brown felt like.” —Jeffrey Eugenides In celebration of Brown University’s 250th anniversary, fifty remarkable, prizewinning writers and artists who went to Brown provide unique stories—many published for the first time—about their adventures on College Hill. Funny, poignant, subversive, and nostalgic, the essays, comics, and poems in this collection paint a vivid picture of college life, from the 1950s to the present, at one of America’s most interesting universities. Contributors: Donald Antrim, Robert Arellano, M. Charles Bakst, Amy DuBois Barnett, Lisa Birnbach, Kate Bornstein, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Mary Caponegro, Susan Cheever, Brian Christian, Pamela Constable, Nicole Cooley, Dana Cowin, Spencer R. Crew, Edwidge Danticat, Dilip D’Souza, David Ebershoff, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Foreman, Amity Gaige, Robin Green, Andrew Sean Greer, Christina Haag, Joan Hilty, A.J. Jacobs, Sean Kelly, David Klinghoffer, Jincy Willett Kornhauser, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, David Levithan, Mara Liasson, Lois Lowry, Ira C. Magaziner, Madeline Miller, Christine Montross, Rick Moody, Jonathan Mooney, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Dawn Raffel, Bill Reynolds, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Ruhl, Ariel Sabar, Joanna Scott, Jeff Shesol, David Shields, Krista Tippett, Alfred Uhry, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Meg Wolitzer “At Brown, we felt safely ensconced in a carefree, counterculture cocoon—free to criticize the university president, join a strike by cafeteria workers, break china laughing, or kiss the sky.” —Pamela Constable




White Noise


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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.




Retaking College Hill


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Impassioned, intellectual, and intense All who see the university as the battleground for our future will live this novel page by page A literary philosophical thriller By Walter Donway Returning to his famous Ivy League alma mater after three years in the Navy, Damian Kossak finds a university trashing its mission and standards. Crossing the college green, he barely avoids a violent encounter with students enforcing agreement with "climate change." His father, the dean of the college, is being "brought up on charges" of interfering with the "diversity" admissions machine. Soon, Damian and a few allies--his father, his former philosophy professor, his Navy Seal buddy, and a wildly sexually uninhibited Israeli girl--are battling on every front: Bullying by students. Admissions quotas. Intimidation of politically incorrect faculty members. Jettisoning the study of Western civilization and achievements. New courses in "victimology." Things quickly become dangerous The university Damian still revered just three years ago is collapsing into dogmas of postmodernist philosophy, political correctness, and righteous violence against dissent. Faced with Damian, his father, and his other allies, the opposition turns to destroying reputations, protests to silence politically incorrect speakers, and, finally, an assassination attempt. But...it is still 'homecoming' Amidst it all, Damian's passion for philosophy, for his faculty mentor, Bill Dyson, and for what the university has meant to him, make his homecoming exciting. And so, too, does Jessica, the orphaned Israeli girl with the straight-A record, who struggles to understand where passion ends, and promiscuity begins. Damian's new buddy, the Navy Seal Jules--even as he saves the day for a courageous woman who comes to try to speak on campus--shocks Damian with his affair with the University's VP for diversity. Individuals with true passions, however seemingly in conflict, see the importance of what they share. It is a theme of Retaking College Hill" that lifts our spirit, promises a better future, even amidst seemingly irreconcilable, bitter conflicts. The violence takes its tragic toll for Damian in a wild climactic motorcycle gang attack. But other battles are won. One victory is the answer to this question: Should America's great entrepreneurs and other creators of wealth, under sniper attack by the leftist professoriate, keep signing big checks for the university and leaving the ideas to the professors? Deliverance For Damian and his allies in Retaking College Hill to pose that question to the beautiful, wealthy daughter descended from the University's founder promises ultimate "deliverance." It is a crucial insight, and step, in reclaiming the University's essential and enduring mission from the professoriate of Postmodernism and students who all-too-often have become their tools. Retaking College Hill is about what might and ought to happen today on America's campuses. Literary and philosophical in its style and depth of ideas, it is also a thriller and a moving romance The drama of Retaking College Hill is unfolding today on American campuses. It is the story of today's heroes, their ideas and loves, and the personal price they pay. It is an honest look at your college, today--or at your alma mater. Discovering the novel Click on the "Buy now" button at the top of this page.




Light on the Hill


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Fool on the Hill


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From the author of Lovecraft Country: Myth and reality collide on a college campus “in a comic fantasy of wonderful energy, invention, and generosity of spirit” (Alison Lurie). Stephen Titus George is a young writer-in-residence at Cornell University in upstate New York. A bestselling author in search of a new story, he sees his life as a modern-day fairy tale starring himself as a would-be knight trying to woo a lovely maiden—or, actually, two: the bewitching Calliope and his guiding light, Aurora Borealis Smith. But he’s not quite in control of the narrative. There’s another writer with even greater influence on campus. The unseen Mr. Sunshine is an eternal, semi-retired deity who’s been fashioning his own story for centuries. He has all his characters in place: dragons, sprites, gnomes, and villains. And now, finally, his hero. As Mr. Sunshine’s world comes to fabulous and violent life, how can Stephen decide his own fate if it’s already being plotted by a god? An epic of life and death, good and evil, love and sorcery, Fool on the Hill lands Matt Ruff happily on the shelf between Tom Robbins and J. R. R. Tolkien for every lover of the “funky and fantastical” (New York magazine). “Inspired . . . rich in flavorful language . . . [a] dazzling tour de force.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The plot comes together like a brilliant clockwork toy.” —Locus




The College on the Hill


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How has the Ontario Agricultural College contributed to Canadian education? What role has the college played in the development of agriculture since it was founded in 1874? This history of Canada’s oldest agricultural college revolves around these two questions. It shows that the college’s mandate has changed in its attempt to serve both education and agriculture. The Ontario Agricultural College was established to enshrine science in farming, but it also became the testing and extension arm of the provincial ministry of agriculture. Direct government control for ninety years provided financial resources not enjoyed by other post-secondary schools, but the results sometimes proved of greater benefit to agriculture than to education or science. Swept into the University of Guelph when it was created in 1964, the college rethought its role. It emerged as a centre for advanced scientific inquiry, for global agricultural programs, and for understanding rural societies. The controversies surrounding these changes and the evolving nature of agriculture and science are brought out fully in this account of the past century and a quarter.