It's academic conference season, and all around the globe--in prefab dorms in provincial England, in luxury hotels in Jerusalem, in the underground chapel at Heathrow--English professors are on the loose. In this second installment in the delightful trilogy of academic satires David Lodge began with Changing Places and ended with Booker Prize-nominee Nice Work, the sun has not quite set on the sexual revolution, while political correctness has not yet reared its humorless head. Join old friends Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, along with a memorable, somewhat oversexed cast of dozens--including a beautiful and mysterious conference addict, a blue-blooded Italian Marxist sadist, and the embittered American novelist and his uncomprehending Japanese translator--as they convene on the conference circuit to compete and couple (and attend the occasional lecture).
Editorial Reviews
"Nominated for the Booker Prize, this parody of academic life follows a huge cast of scholarly characters who travel the world from one conference to another. Sleeping through seminars, scheming for better teaching positions, going to bed with fellow conferees, these men and women seem to use every organ and part of the body except the mind. 'The real fun of the book is the author's razor-sharp prose and wit, which are turned more or less good-naturedly on his fellow academics,' PW stated. Lodge is a professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham." --Publishers Weekly
"A delectable comedy of bad manners...among recent portrayals of the literary establishment at work and play I can think of none so consistently entertaining or, in an odd way, so genially fair-minded as David Lodge's Small World." --The Washington Post Book World
"Small World is a three-ring circus of academic drollery...in this devilishly sophisticated entertainment...the reader need not be a professor of English to get the jokes. The only requirements are an appreciation of witty dialogue of more twist and turns than a Grand Prix race -- and a genuine sympathy for the foolish creatures called human beings. Lodge combines John Updike's precise social observation with Philip Roth's uproarious humor." --Newsday
About the Author
David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.
