“A sharply observed yet tender novel of academic life and its many sand traps” from the acclaimed author of Eddie and the Cruisers (The New York Times).
 
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2008
 
Kluge’s brilliant novel tells of George Canaris, a writing professor who is on the verge of forced retirement at a small college in Ohio when he is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Kluge’s creation of Canaris as the first faculty member in half a century whose death merits an obituary in the New York Times is right on the money. A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts, the fictional Times obituary said. And a mystery.
 
Canaris, hero and anti-hero, was the author of two well-received novels and a book of essays, all published more than thirty years ago. Taken together, they were the beginnings of an impressive shelf to which, in all his years in Ohio, he added nothing. With a book listed among the 100 greatest novels of all time, decades separating Canaris from the hefty advance taken on his next book The Beast, which was to be his masterpiece and not a page to show of it, Canaris is a great fictional creation—an enigma. Inevitably, speculation grows that the book was a myth, a lie, a joke. Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris’s literary executor—executor of what is unclear. Thus begins a search through lives and letters that is at once gripping, hilarious and affirming.
 
“A sparkling new novel, witty and astute.” —Entertainment Weekly