Forced into a top-secret training program, Dr. Brandt Savage, on sabbatical from the University of Chicago, is mentally and physically transformed into the perfect assassin and must prevent a new class of killers from escaping this harsh place where their ancestors first fought to make a better world.

Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. • Now the AMC Original Series Lucky Hank.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's...

"One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever's world upside down. When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner's friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she'll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect...

"An astute novel following the life of an art professor at Stockholm University as she navigates the academic world, with its undercurrents of eroticism, competition, deceit, and fear"-- Provided by publisher.

"Dazzling...Critics hailed Buwalda as 'The Dutch answer to Jonathan Franzen', but his brilliance is entirely unique."—The Times (UK) 
Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family—including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters and a successful future son-in-law—and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the...

Advocating a global as opposed to a Eurocentric perspective in the college classroom, discusses why and how to teach about China's Silk Road. The romance of the journey along the Silk Road with its exotic locales and luxury goods still excites the popular imagination. The trade route between China and Central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s, the Silk Road can provide great insight for contemporary higher education curricula....

"Every summer since college, twenty-nine-year-old Courtney has traded the familiarity of the Midwest for the allure of Nantucket. Now an established university professor, she finds herself caught between two lifestyles and two very different men. Because this summer has taken an unexpected turn and now she must decide what she really wants"-- Provided by publisher.

"As a creative writing professor in a bucolic Vermont town, Gil's quiet life is indelibly changed when he receives shocking news: His sister, Sharon, and her husband have been killed in a car accident, and their only son, seventeen-year-old Matthew, is coming to live with Gil and his family. It's with apprehension that Gil and his wife, Molly, greet Matthew. Yes, he has just lost both his parents. But they haven't seen him in seven years, and the...

Newly single and far from home, Professor Molly Barda wants to stay out of trouble until she gets tenure at remote Mahina State University. But when local big-shot Jimmy Tanaka, pledges a huge donation to Molly's college and then disappears, Molly's bottom-line-obsessed dean tasks her with locating the missing mogul. As Molly explores ancient grudges and uncovers old scandals, she starts to fall for Tanaka's competitor, the too-good-to-be-true Donnie...

"Jonas Luscher, the author of Barbarian Spring-"a most humorous and convincing satire of the ridiculous excesses of those responsible for the financial crisis" (The New York Times Book Review)-returns to the topic of neoliberal arrogance in his Swiss Book Prize winning, hilarious and wicked novel about a man facing the ruins of his life, and his world"-- Provided by publisher.