I’m very proud to have worked on this book, the latest Ellipsis Press title. Tom Whalen has written an incredibly beautiful and surprising novel, a sly allegory about power and bureaucracy that has a narrator with that saintly and cuckoo mix to whom Jakob von Gunten might be close cousin.
“The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence. But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination. To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. ” —Norman Lock
Some more info, including an excerpt, here.
Available for order from SPD or from Ellipsis Press or from Amazon.
If you’re a reviewer and want an reader’s copy, please email me at: eugene at ellipsispress.com.