Sex and Violence

Professors are being murdered in a way that suggests a sexual motive in a novel that occupies in imaginative space an area homologous to the area occupied by Columbia University in actual space. Turtle Point Press' first murder mystery is a novel in the form of letters written by Wynn O'Leary to his brother Joel, a bop trumpet player who died of a heroin overdose. O'Leary is an English professor, an expert on modernism. The author of this witty and unabashedly politically incorrect novel is a professor in the English department of Columbia University, where some of the sex and all of the violence happens. It's an enclosed world with its own customs and denizens. The time is the late 1980s. Cultural theory and gender politics reign supreme, smoking is still permitted in the cafeteria, and-unfortunately for O'Leary-Viagra is but a twinkle in a scientist's eye. George Stade lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. He has edited numerous scholarly books, and he has published many reviews and articles in journals such as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review. He is a consulting editor of Barnes & Noble Classics. His previous murder mystery, Confessions of a Lady Killer, was published by W.W. Norton. The New York Times called it "a novel that bristles with irony and wit," and The Washington Post praised its "Nabokovian control of language."