Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Pictures from an Institution

Pictures from an Institution

Jarrell, Randall

Paperback

Series: Phoenix Fiction

Humor

ISBN10: 0226393755
ISBN13: 9780226393759
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Apr 30 2010
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.90
Language: English

A finalist for the National Book Award, this classic novel of midcentury campus life is demonically funny and brutally cutting

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women's college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell's classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire-and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker's razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College-mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself.

A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power. . . . A delight of true understanding.-Wallace Stevens

I'm greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It's a remarkable book.-Robert Penn Warren

Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures . . . is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell's forte.-Mary Welp

One of the wittiest books of modern times.-New York Times

[T]he father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that 'political correctness' was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago.-Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition. . . . Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd.-Edmund Fuller, Saturday Review

[A] work of fiction, and a dizzying and brilliant work of social and literary criticism. Not only 'a unique and serious joke-book, ' as Lowell called it, but also a meditation made up of epigrams.-Michael Wood

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