Fiction. 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. This 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 the scientist's eye.

George Stade is the author of three novels: Confessions of a Lady-Killer, Sex and Violence: A Love Story, Love is War. He has edited numerous scholarly books, and is Consulting Editorial Director of Barnes and Noble Classics and Editor-in-Chief of Scribner's British Writers Series and the fourteen-volume European Writers Series. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.