Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror

by James Hynes

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year

Combining the wit of David Lodge with Poe's delicious sense of the macabre, these are three witty, spooky novellas of satire set in academia―a world where Derrida rules, love is a "complicated ideological position," and poetic justice is served with an ideological twist.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories, Academia, Mystery, Humor, Modern

338 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

James Hynes’ essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Review, and Salon.

A native of Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Miami University, Grinnell College, and the University of Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Reviews

[Rebecca]

I read the first of this volume’s three suspense novellas and will save the others for future years of R.I.P. or Novellas in November. At 95 pages, it feels like a complete, stand-alone plot with solid character development and a believable arc. Paul and Elizabeth are academics marooned at different colleges: Paul is finishing up his postdoc and teaches menial classes at an English department in Iowa, where they live; Elizabeth commutes long-distance to spend four days a week in Chicago, where she’s on track for early tenure at the university.

The couple’s cat, Charlotte, starts acting up, peeing in random places around the apartment. The animal psychic they hire says it’s because a woman keeps coming and going, disturbing the cat’s routines. Elizabeth assumes it’s her fault, feels terrible, and redoubles her efforts to get her boss to offer Paul a job on the basis of his bizarre literary/pop culture mash-up thesis chapters. But readers soon learn the real reason for the cat’s unease: Paul is carrying on an affair with Kymberly, a graduate student from the communications department. Charlotte is preternaturally determined to terrorize Kym and broadcast Paul’s secret. It’s an amusing battle of wills that comes to have greater stakes. Mentions of computer and telephone technology made this seem slightly dated, but I liked Hynes’s writing.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

The 3 tales of terror are supposed to be ruthless & chilling with cliff hanger endings. The blurb says, 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. I thought the characters were sad examples of humanity with nothing particularly funny about them or their situations. I couldn't work up any particular empathy for any of them, although I did sympathize a bit with the cat in the first story.

Unfortunately, I was pretty sure where the story was going very early on & that's exactly where it went. There were absolutely no surprises including the 'cliff hanger' ending, which fell flat as it landed. It was just too obvious. This meant that all the description attempting to set the mood was boring as hell as I kept waiting for each predictable point to FINALLY get made.

Worse, I didn't find one of the major character's motivations logical at all. The entire theme of the story was self interest trumping morals. The girl friend is obviously similar to the main character in that regard so why would she hook up with him? His star is not ascending & she doesn't seem to even like him very much. Amidst all the long winded discussion, I had far too much time for every flaw to become glaring.

I never made it all the way through the next 2 stories. I tried, but found each of them as boring as the first, so moved on.

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing. Oh, well written and all; sometimes very witty, especially if you've spent any time in academia, among academics. OK, fair dues: there are some hilarious digs at academic prima donnas, academic cat-fighting, and fashions in academic discourse. Just chosen at random:

"... he concocted an whole new outline for his book, chapter after chapter: 'The Sitcom at the End of the New Frontier: The Brady Bunch and The Wild Bunch in Contrapuntal Perspective.' ... 'A French Bikini on a Wild Island Girl: The Tempest, Gilligan's Island and the Social Construction of the Narrative of Abandonment' ..."

If you don't find that hilarious, just trust me, you had to be there ... The real punch line to the joke is that there are probably actual articles out there, in distinguished academic journals, with just those titles. So as a satire on the lengths that otherwise decent people will go to to get a tenured position at a mediocre institution of learning, this is right on the money.

But, page after page, it begins to feel a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. In the three novellas that comprise Publish and Perish we meet three academic horrors, two of whom are willing to kill to achieve or maintain their academic status, and the third ... well, I'm not exactly sure what the protagonist of '99,' the middle of the three stories, does to deserve the fate that is meted out to him. Yes, he's not a nice person. He's a bit of an arrogant prat. But, still, if we're talking "just deserts," it seems like overkill.

Publish and Perish is advertised, on the cover, as "Three Tales of Tenure and TERROR" (the caps are theirs), and it's as TERROR that is fails, for me. The three novellas are just not the tiniest bit frightening, or haunting. (The third story, 'Casting the Runes,' has its moments, but the climax -- cross-dressing intrigue at a panel at an academic conference -- loses all focus in a difficult to follow, and easy to skim, farce.) As "twist in the tale" stories, they fail because it's pretty obvious exactly what's going to happen to whom, after about two pages. I'm quite sure there have been episodes of The Twilight Zone that have done it all before.

[John Bellamy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The toxic careerist culture of modern academia has produced a bounty of wonderfully entertaining fiction, the short list of which must include Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim,” Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution,” Malcolm Bradbury’s “The History Man,” John Barth’s “Giles Goat Boy” and David Lodge’s “Changing Places” and “Small World.” But, never, at least to my knowledge, has it produced anything quite like the three fiendishly clever novellas contained in James Hynes’ “Publish and Perish.” All of them deal with the perils and politics of postmodernist / deconstructionist scholarship, and in all them, I’m happy to report, the intellectually guilty receive their just deserts. Some reviewers have identified Edgar Allan Poe as the primary influence in these ever-so-modern horror stories but the more obvious inspiration here seems to be M. R. James, an early 20th century English don, once considered the world champion of ghost story writers but now known only to enthusiasts of archaic genre fiction. James' spooky atmosphere pervades all three of Hynes’ delightful shockers, most explicitly in his final and best tale, “Casting the Runes.” Highly recommended to both fans of academic satire and modern horror.

[Hubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful set of 3 novellas (vaguely interlinked) blending academic satire and Poe-ish horror and supernatural. Hynes' delightfully verbose yet descriptive prose adds much atmosphere to each of the stories. In particular he has a good knack of what it's like to be in the midst of the academic upheavals of the 90s when gender studies and postmodernism had taken off. The characters, particularly the secondary figures, come off a like caricatures of academics, but this works to the benefit of the plot and purported style of the writing. One could quibble about some aspects of the plot development, e.g. in the last novella the climactic scene (involving a switcharoo of one page from a manuscript for another) tends to wrap up too implausibly.

Really enjoyed the cat character in the first novella - she plays such a crucial role in that one!

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is quite good, but while I found the first story disturbingly engaging, the second story didn’t draw me in and I found the third story a bit stretched. I also didn’t really understand the main character, and so I wound up not particularly interested by the end. Overall I’m glad I read it, for the sake of reading interesting writing, but the stories just didn’t necessarily appeal to me.

[Bree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable- for anyone that's been there in academia and seen the ugly side of misogynist fogies, looming deadlines, and the uselessness of arcane knowledge. Liked it much, much more than his Kings of Infinite Space, a related novel. I totally dug it.

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seldom by books on impulse, but this was one of those times. Since then I have purchased every book by the author and read almost all of them. The writer brilliantly mixes academia with macabre with black humor.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

hilarious short stories. One has to do with a cat who discovers his owner, a professor, is cheating on his wife and sets out to sabotage the professor so that his wife finds out.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim, expecting horror in academia with likely some humor added, and it was satisfying on that front. The stories intertwine a little, with characters from the first and second, at least, showing up in the third.

The stories are generally well-written and I did enjoy them; however, the first one featured an utterly unlikable main character, who, however, was more enjoyable in retrospect because he was at least active. The second story featured a mostly passive main character, and the third a completely passive one.

Which may be realistic for books about academics, but it did detract from the enjoyment.

However, the utter dysfunction of modern academia was at times either amusing or, appropriately, horrific.

At least one of the stories is a straight-up (acknowledged) pastiche of an earlier, important work of horror, and the others draw heavily on past works both for the plot and the occasional name taken from the writers of past works or their characters.

A fun read, especially if you’ve spent some Goodall-like time in the mist of academia.

[dominic · Rating 3 out of 5]

well written but satire from white men often rubs me the wrong way. the digs at academia and the white men in it (lol) were at times witty and effective, but more often then not the stories were drawn out and not as scary as advertised :0

the last story was my favorite of the three, followed but the first, and the second comes in last — moral of the story is that cats are homies

[Felicity Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating short stories that, while slightly macabre, kept me entertained. Well written.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first two stories as soon as I checked out this book, and enjoyed them immensely, but then it took me about three months to pick it up again. Thank you, holidays! I agree with other reviewers that these stories likely appeal much more to folks involved in academia, who will find themselves snickering and nodding along to the character-type parodies. The first story is all Poe, the second story follows a Wicker Man-like story arc, and the author acknowledges that the third story is a "pastiche of the short story of the same name by M.R. James (1862-1936)." But despite these fairly unoriginal origins, the stories each have their own distinct flair and Hynes does an excellent job in the telling.

Recommended for fans of David Lodge and light horror/gothic stories, as well as academic types.

[Dieter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny kinds of skills with academic satire and horror kinds of themes. Guy is definitely a plot builder and a drama builder of a certain kind. Makes him worth reading. He has page turning skills and makes a valiant effort to grip into academic excesses.

[David Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hynes strikes again with faux occult satire on the academic life, this time with stories/novellas. He's a hoot.

[micaela · Rating 2 out of 5]

i was torn between a 2 and a 3 here. count it as a 2.5.

the first story was pretty disappointing to me, in that i felt it did not take advantage of the horrors of academia well. i'm not in that world myself but i am adjacent, through family members and friends. ooh an insecure guy is cheating on his more successful wife and his situation is being manifested in his poltergeist cat. yawn. it dovetailed with a particularly busy time in my professional life, but it STILL took me an eon to get through the first story.

the second and third stories were much more engaging. a colonialist patronizing asshole who views all culture except his own as primitive, gets caught up in the very rituals he's trying to exploit for his own purposes? nice. and the last one, which actually uses the academic setting the best in my opinion, confronts the power imbalance of gender among colleagues, and the yes, terror of the tenure track, when publishing is a tenuous and fragile measure of job security. (plus i'm a sucker for when things tie together and you weren't expecting it. coming to a climax at the very conference from story 2 is great.)

i realized halfway through i forgot to check the copyright date. i think that i give it slightly more credit than i originally did (that's the extra .5) because quite frankly it's old, and at least in my observation, the interest in discussing racial, economic, and gender disparity in the academy was just not as present (not that it didn't bear talking about, though!) back in the 90s. (feel free to correct me, i was a very small child watching my mom at the time.)

still, academia is a world teeming with horror metaphors, from budget cuts to departments, to big universities (like my alma mater) eating up small colleges, to the complex and thorny dynamics of writing papers together - nevermind the relationships with students, who are nearly entire absent in this book*. the second and third stories utilize these more, but the first really didn't. it might as well have been about two authors, or two scientists... or any situation in which a husband and wife might work in the same field.

the chair on netflix was excellent, and got the seal of approval from people who actually work in academia. it wasn't a horror story, but i thought of it many times while reading this. academia ITSELF can be the building block for a story, not just a hollow setting for one bc most people don't know the ins and outs of it. but it comes down to this: even the stories i liked in here just didn't grab me, which may be genre or writing style or simply age. it's too bad, because i think there's fertile ground for the next attempt at this kind of book.



*i know many high-up professors at some schools basically don't interact with students, but even THAT is another avenue for horror, the ghost in the halls kind of thing. just saying

[john callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author has written 3 stories in which strange and terrible supernatural things happen to academics made refugees from those groves of academe in the real-life 1990s debate over . . . (wait for it) . . . (are you ready?) . . . (okay, here it comes!) . . . over what some 18th-century Hawaiians had in mind when they killed Captain Cook, a bitter debate fought in real-life between two anthropologists, Princeton's Gananath Obeyesekere and U Chicago's Marshall Sahlins.

Now, this debate was extremely important to them, but if you step outside the universe of anthropology, or of academia, it can seem to be very, very arcane, and of interest to very few people.

(But if I'd been an anthropologist in those days, I'd have taken it darn seriously, and fought tirelessly for the correct position on the question.)

The debate was real, and bitter, and the three characters in this book are collateral damage of it. The stories the author spins are wonderful and leave the reader surprised and shocked.

I recommend this book to everyone who likes well-wrought stories, but especially to graduate students, professors. and anyone who studied the humanities or social sciences in the heyday of theory.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I normally avoid horror as a genre, but I really liked Poe when I was younger. You combine horror with academia, and well... I'm there.

The first story was great. It was very much in the vein of "The Tell-Tale Heart", with an extra bit of spice from the frantic fear of precarious employment in academe. The second story was much less interesting to me. It has strong notes of "The Cask of Amontillado", but felt overall a bit weaker than the first. As a horror story of academia it functioned more in a metaphorical way (which all the stories did, but this one cried out for it).

The third was interesting. The first two were very Greek tragedy, in their inexorable push towards doom, but the third had genuine suspense. I'm not sure how original the story was - Hynes himself admits to cribbing extensively from M. R. James, whom I'm not familiar with - but it was good. Except for that in this one the reader is made to root for the postmodernist, which is a bit unforgivable.

As usual, I'm rating my enjoyment of the book. The derivative nature of the work might suggest a lower rating, but it was original enough to keep my attention.

[Jason Schmidt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happened to pick this book up at a library sale - the idea of three horror stories set in the world of academia intrigued me (and the pretentiousness of that world really shines through in these novellas). And, I rather enjoyed these three tales - the reliance on the work of Poe, Shirley Jackson are M.R. James was a bit overkill (to the point where an allusion towards the beginning of the the second story ruined the “twist” for me), but as “modernized” interpretations of several famous stories (if you are a fan of the three authors that I mentioned, you’ll know exactly what stories I am alluding to when you have read this), I enjoyed this for what it is. I also enjoyed how the third story ties into the previous two, connecting the all together. Overall, a solid reading experience, and I look forward to reading more of Hynes’s work.

[Karen Adkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three interconnected novellas that are mashups of the campus novel and Gothic suspense/horror. It was published in the late 90s, so if you're a Gen X academic like me, you will find the authentic period detail perfect(ly traumatic). All good campus novels center on academic ambition, but this one is already thinking about the precarity that dominates the job market, which I enjoyed. I did wish that the women characters, while complex, would have not been so obsessively rendered physically. We are endlessly reminded that the fat character is fat, and the physical attractiveness of much of the other characters is endlessly redescribed to us. By contrast, the men characters get their attractiveness or not initially rendered but their bodies are only reminded to us as it's useful for the story. But that's a pretty small gripe.

[Haoyan Do · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an enjoyable read. I actually didn't really finish the book. I only finished the first two stories and stopped at the beginning of the third story. I am like this. I probably will pick up the 3rd one in a little while. I love the cat story and somehow it has some Edgar Allan Poe quality to it. I am not sure I understand the second story correctly. There might be some reference or connotation that I have completely missed. The hero was drugged and was carried into the famous Stonehenge area. Was he going to be sacrificed?

[Samantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only redeeming story was the third. I find it hard to enjoy a book where the main characters are unsympathetic men with large egos. The third story was the only redeeming one, and even that one was too long-winded to be particularly good. I did sympathize with the cat in the first one, but all the stories were too predictable to be particularly suspenseful.

[Antipoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two are excellent adaptations (the cat dies, so skip that part if you care, like I do), and the third...is almost good. Sadly the primary conflict (the baddie steals the protagonist's intellectual work) is not resolved, and she survives the more immediate problem (he steals it by setting up her death) because someone else takes over for her.

Highly recommended for Poe/Wickerman/MR James fans.

[Christine Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the first and last tales the best. The first with the cat knowing what was happening and the last as it was genuinely spooky. The man has great lectures on Writing Great Fiction from the Great Courses. He just doesn't always practice what he preaches.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a perfect Halloween book! Wonderful writing, excellent twists, and creepy to boot! Not surprisingly, these will appeal most to those who haunt the halls of academia to make a living. Great fun, and not something I might have picked out, so thanks to my good friend on campus for suggesting it.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the first story about Charlotte, the cat, was enjoying the second and then it turned weird and the third was fully involved in the supernatural. I really enjoy the way James Hynes writes.
8/10

[Nick Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

V enjoyable set of three campus tales of kitschy creepiness. Not sure what's more horrifying: the supernatural stuff lurking at the edges of the frame, or the prospect of failing to get tenure. Anxiety manifestations for an anxious crowd.

[Robert P. Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great selection of stories. All of them are so well done. The plot develops in surprising and satisfying ways. The author has such a command of the story and never is tempted to engage in cheap thrills or histrionics. He knows the life he writes about and writes about it so well.

[Noits · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read that reminded me structurally of A New York Trilogy by Auster. 3 ostensibly independent novellas that are surprisingly symbiotic. A witty take on the paranormal novella that shameless and consciously taps into other writers of the genre. Loved it.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic novel (I know it is referred to as a collection of three stories, but I am comfortable calling it a novel because they are tightly linked, with development in one story contributing to character development in another). An excellent take-down of academics and a great tale of terror to boot. Hynes’ style is slow-burn, but once it takes off it soars high.