Small World

( 5 )

Overview

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance". From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World ...

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More About This Book

Overview

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance". From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance." From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Nominated for the Booker Prize, this parody of academic life follows a huge cast of scholarly characters who travel the world from one conference to another. Sleeping through seminars, scheming for better teaching positions, going to bed with fellow conferees, these men and women seem to use every organ and part of the body except the mind. ``The real fun of the book is the author's razor-sharp prose and wit, which are turned more or less good-naturedly on his fellow academics,'' PW stated. Lodge is a professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham. April
Joel Conarroe
"A delectable comedy of bad manners...among recent portrayals of the literary establishment at work and play I can think of none so consistently entertaining or, in an odd way, so genially fair-minded as David Lodge's Small World." -- The Washington Post Book world
Dan Cryer
"Small World is a three-ring circus of academic drollery...in this devilishely sophisticated entertainment...the reader need not be a professor of English to get the jokes. The only requirements are an appreciation of witty dialogue of more twist and turns than a Grand Prix race -- and a genuine sympathy for the foolish creatures called human beings." -- Newsday
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780140244861
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 6/28/1995
  • Pages: 352
  • Sales rank: 315,204
  • Product dimensions: 5.08 (w) x 7.78 (h) x 0.66 (d)

Meet the Author

David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.

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Table of Contents

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 5 )
Rating Distribution

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Sort by: Showing all of 5 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 17, 2004

    a historically important book

    Small World makes light of a terribly important social phenomenon. On the other hand, the book was published in 1984, before academia had become the place it is now. The novel is also slow by American standards, taking its time with each scene, including scenes that make the reader wonder why the scenes are there at all. The most serious problem from a social point of view is that academia now is not the place it was twenty years ago. For a current fictional picture of academia and the story of how it got that way, get The Rape of Alma Mater. What has happened in America has also happened in the U.K, as Small World makes clear. These people are networking on an international scale. Perhaps, Lodge thought these literary ideas were so silly they would blow over in a short time and he could laugh them out of existence. ('Then, what's it all for?!') But the grim-faced neoMarxists of the present universities have no sense of humor and are not about to be laughed out of their entrenched positions of power. The situation is now very serious. But read this book if you like. Then, however, get the novel Alma Mater mentioned above and find out what it's like now.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 26, 2004

    Various degrees of separation

    The world of academia is vast but becomes like any other......wide at the bottom....smaller toward the top of the food chain.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 11, 2001

    His Best Yet

    I read it first, before two others and it's still the greatest. But I want to read them all now. Small World is about a very LIKABLE young English prof (of course), and Phillip Swallow and Morris Zapp from 'Changing Places' as well, about whom I can't say the same.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 25, 2008

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 25, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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