Books
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Kings of Infinite Space
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Paul Trilby is having a bad day. If he were to be honest with himself, Paul Trilby would have to admit that he's having a bad life. His wife left him. Three subsequent girlfriends left him. He's fallen from a top-notch university teaching job, to a textbook publisher, to, eventually, working as a temp writer for the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services. And even here, in this land of carpeted partitions and fluorescent lighting, Paul cannot escape the curse his life has become. For it is not until he begins a tentative romance with the office's sassy mail girl that he begins to notice things are truly wrong. Strange sounds come from the air conditioning vents, the ceiling bulges, a body disappears. Mysterious men lurk about town, wearing thick glasses and jagged smiles...
Kings of Infinite Space is a hilarious and horrifying spoof on our everyday lives and gives true voice to the old adage, "Work is Hell."
Also available as an audiobook.
"Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too."
-Laura Miller, Salon
"This macabre, funny, and very twisted satire of office life displays James Hynes as a wonderfully eccentric and entirely original writer."
-Adrienne Miller, Esquire
"Immensely witty...A fast, funny ride through pretty peculiar territory."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
"What makes this novel scarier—and more ambitious—than The Lecturer's Tale and Publish and Perish, Hynes's previous books, is that it isn't about the academy. It's about all of us—porters, waitresses, office schlubs and TV anchorwomen, as well as people who read The Norton Anthology of English Literature. They, we, are all trying to rise or at least not fall, haunted by the idea that someone—no matter where we are on the totem pole—is richer, more important, hipper, less humiliated than us."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Hynes has mastered the art of luring, hooking, and reeling readers in with his salty style and quick wit...A refreshing escape from the typically mundane plots of commercial fiction."
-USA Today
"Kings of Infinite Space is social satire that slides smoothly into horror."
-Time
"People really do laugh out loud when reading Hynes novels...Funny, frightening, smart, and sexy! It is absolutely unlike anything you have ever read."
-Keith Taylor, Ann Arbor Observer
The Lecturer's Tale
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Nelson Humboldt is a visiting adjunct lecturer in the English department at the prestigious University of the Midwest, until he is unceremoniously fired on Halloween. Minutes after the ax falls, his right finger is severed in a freak accident. Doctors manage to reattach the finger, but when the bandages come off, Nelson realizes he has acquired a strange power—he can force his will on others with a touch of his finger. And so he keeps the lease on his university-owned townhouse and picks up two sections of composition, saving his career from utter ruin. But soon these victories are not enough, and Nelson's finger burns for even greater glory—tenure. Cleverly macabre, The Lecturer's Tale is a pitch-perfect blend of satire and horror. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Also available as a Kindle edition. Published in Spanish as El Cuento del Docente and in Russian as Рассказ лектора.
"The most devastating satirical portrait of contemporary academic life I've ever read."
-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
"Wicked virtuoso humor...a superb supernatural farce."
-Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Hynes writes so brilliantly, inventively, and lovingly about the sins of academe that the reader ends up, like Milton's Satan, even more eager to serve in Hell."
-Elaine Showalter, The Chronicle of Higher Education
"A full-blown academic farce. Hynes has hit on a brilliant ploy in weaving Gothic horror with contemporary lit crit."
-Tobin Harshaw, The New York Times Book Review
"A wild, laugh-out-loud ride."
-Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle
Publish and Perish
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Read excerpts from "Queen of the Jungle," "99," and "Casting the Runes."
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 a supernatural twist. Combining the wit of David Lodge with Poe's delicious sense of the macabre, Publish and Perish is stylish, unsettling, and funny on every page. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Also available as an audiobook. Published in German as two books, Dschungelkönigin and Ein rauschendes Fest, and in Russian as Издай и умри.
"Riveting...exhilarating...a work of sheer joy."
-Cathleen Schine, The New York Times Book Review
"Entirely delightful...wickedly funny...There hasn't been a genuinely adroit novel of academic manners since Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
"Hynes must have struck a pact with the devil when he began writing these tales because their tone is perfect."
-Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Deliciously creepy novellas...Hynes's writing is diamond sharp, revealing his characters' souls as surely as a Judgment Day angel."
-Amy Waldman, People
The Wild Colonial Boy
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Read an excerpt.
After fifteen years of violence, a tense calm pervades Northern Ireland, soon to be broken by Jimmy Coogan, an IRA veteran who seeks to restore the Movement to its violent tradition. A true believer, as cunning as he is dangerous, Jimmy has stolen ten pounds of plastic explosive, intending to destroy the parliamentary ambitions of the IRA leadership by perpetrating a terrorist bombing in London.
Into Jimmy's turbulent world come two young Americans: Brian, vain, ironic, but well-meaning; and Clare, a beautiful, earnest college student on her junior year abroad. In Ireland on a seemingly harmless errand for his Irish Republican family in Detroit, Brian is recruited to Jimmy's bloody mission by his cousin Maire, Coogan's passionate and sharp-tongued wife. Only half-aware of each other's motives, Brian and Clare, Jimmy and Maire are all drawn into the deadly and unforgiving labyrinth of modern terrorism, borne inexorably toward a horrific and fatal climax.
A love story as well as a thriller, James Hynes's first novel is a page-turning tale of personal and political intrigue in the grand tradition, a classic story of commitment, violence, and betrayal. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the real stuff...Go out today and get this book, and plan on doing nothing else but reading it tonight."
-George V. Higgins, The Washington Post Book World
"Exciting and very well written...Hynes stakes a fair claim to that morally complex modern political terrain mapped out by the likes of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Stone."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A first novelist with a real story, intelligently imagined."
-The New Yorker
"Compelling...Powerful...A sharp eye for detail."
-The New York Times Book Review