School Days - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Galassi Klappentext The new novel from the acclaimed poet and publisher asks fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student. Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago.     Then Leverett’s headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories, above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie and the support of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson.     Sam’s search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam’s assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago. Leseprobe Late afternoon sunlight was flooding the apartment. Pillars of dust rotated in the drowsy air. He was glad to be home after a long day, ready to put his feet up and look at the paper, but the phone was vibrating in his jacket pocket. He leaned back on the island in the kitchen and listened to the message from Jeanne Harrison, the Head’s secretary. “Good afternoon, Sam,” she enunciated crisply. “Boris would like to see you in his office at five o’clock.” The island was too big for the room. He and Anne had always got in each other’s way when they cooked together, which they did if they couldn’t face the dining hall. The pattern in the fake marble made it impossible to keep clean, since you couldn’t see the dirt unless you were viewing it from the proper angle. But it wasn’t their kitchen, after all. Leverett’s head of facilities had radiated pride when he showed them the house after it had been rebuilt certified LEED-Gold. It was one hundred percent energy efficient and tight as a tick. The only way to let fresh air into the place was to open the door and fan it in. But the man was blind to how ugly his state-of-the-art remake of this ramshackle old New England farmhouse was. Bixler House, one of some forty residences in the town of Leverett that had been annexed for senior faculty and staff to live in once they’d done their twenty years of dorm duty, had been handsome in a shambling, peeling-paint, splintered way. Now the new windows were out of proportion and the kitchen-dining room with its pale linoleum floor belonged in a nursing home, as Anne put it. It looked institutional inside and out—which of course it was. Sam took an apple from an old earthenware mixing bowl, nearly unreachable in the middle of the island. Everything was apple, apple, apple this time of year: apple cider, apple butter, apple crumble, applejack. Apples and pumpkins— and those twee little corn husk decorations everyone put up on their newly hung storm doors. Fall had a way of making him crabby, intolerant, restless in his skin, and prone to regret. Those sly, ever-shorter late October afternoons every- one professes to love were bound to bring on a disorienting queasiness. Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” was capable of really laying him low. He had fifteen minutes before meeting Boris. He trudged upstairs to the rat’s nest that was his study, threw his book bag on his desk, and fell into his old chintz reading chair. English 101 had been a slog. Afternoon classes often were, this early in the year, when the new arrivals were still getting their bearings. Convincing knobs, as freshmen were called, that what a character says in Romeo and Juliet does...

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Galassi
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.08.2023
• EAN: 9781635424126
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-412-6
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature