“ Ray Levy’s School is a blistering and bitterly funny send-up, lampooning deconstructionism and the academy at large. With crackling wit and exhilarating formal play, Levy has given us a welcome antidote to the toxic culture of (some) graduate degree programs in literary studies.”
—Megan Milks, author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories
“School is a tour de force of deadpan wit, a delicious détournement in which Levy amusingly mingles (and mangles) various scholarly and cultural archives. Mashing up a range of cult materials (from Bride of Frankenstein to Venus in Furs to The Animal That Therefore I Am), Levy impishly enacts an immanent institutional critique against the cult of intellectual celebrity, the cult of deconstruction, and the cult of academia. It is hard not to feel a shudder of schadenfreude at witnessing Levy’s hilariously clever low blows to high theory. This is cutting-edge academic satire of the highest order.”
—Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry.
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“ There is such pleasure to be found in School, such virulence and cruelty. It’s a novel in rituals, a novel to read and reread until you disappear into its demon-ridden thickets of meaning and emerge as anything, a six-headed elk-owl that sings in the voice of Nancy Sinatra, a cenobitic orca, the end of Hegel.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan— -