Ellenberg’s offbeat premise gives rise to plenty of witty and absurd situations that recall masters like Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut…Campus novels often tend toward the parochial or the arcane, but Ellenberg breathes fresh air into the genre.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“It is Ellenberg’s keen sense of humor and propensity for drawing out the absurdity in collegiate obsessions that takes center stage in this very strange and over-the-top but amusing novel.” —Booklist
“Slate.com journalist Ellenberg, a well-known Princeton mathematician, debuts with this tale of a deranged scholar out west who devotes his life to the study of the worst poet in history…Nicely done and genuinely funny.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The Grasshopper King is a traditional comic academic novel, complete with deranged deans and crass coaches and desperate professors trapped in the hinterlands…Light, amusing, and carefully crafted as it is, The Grasshopper King is a cautionary tale about the perils of precision.” —The Washington Post Book World
“…a delightful little novel…” —American Book Review
“A zany send-up of campus life.” —The New York Sun
“The Grasshopper King is a breezy discovery for readers…In this madcap novel, the grasshopper-like characters croak, leap, and butt heads—ostensibly over academic fortune, but really in an effort to understand the meaning of love.” —The Boston Phoenix
“[T]he Grasshopper King is engaging. Sam’s self-deprecating narration is witty and satisfyingly melancholic, Ellenberg’s characters genuinely likeable, and there is an undercurrent of conspiracies and machinations that keeps the narrative moving.”
—Baltimore City Paper
“Ultimately, it seems everyone is touched by this poet, or the professor, or the language becomes miserable and mad…and in turn, more honest in describing how woefully funny the world truly is.” —Minneapolis City Pages
“The funniest campus novel in ages, and a slippery, serious-minded investigation of what happens when good languages go bad.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Following in the tradition of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Jordan Ellenberg’s The Grasshopper King tells the story of Sam Grapearbor, a sullen ambitious grad student, and Higgs, a professor obsessed with an obscure European poet…Ellenberg really shines when he scrutinizes, with hilarious insight, and the relationship between Grapearbor and the relationship between his girlfriend Julia…It’s here, in the imperfect romantic sphere, that Ellenberg shows off his terrific, formidable humor.” —Rockland Journal News
“Like reading Murakami, readers will find themselves in a world that is so absurd, yet so palpable. Writing with wit and cleverness, Ellenberg moves deftly among moments of poignancy, satire, and slapstick comedy to make The Grasshopper King an entertaining and worthwhile read.” —Manitou Messenger
"The funniest send-up of academia since Jane Smiley’s Moo.” —ForeWord magazine
“Zany campus satire about a university with a lame basketball program whose only residual claim to fame is its Gravinics Department, dedicated to the study of an obscure European country’s only notable export—the possibly world-saving poet, Henderson. Speedy, smart, and winsome meditations on immortality and obscurity.” —The Believer
“The Grasshopper King is clever without pretentiousness, filled with enduring absurdity, bittersweet feelings and quirky characters.” —Ripsaw News
“The Grasshopper King is a quirky story which is warmly appealing in a rich tapestry of unfolding hidden secrets…very highly recommended reading and a novel which clearly documents Jordan Ellenberg as an author to keep track of!”
—Library Bookwatch
“The Grasshopper King is an exceptionally silly book. It’s also quite brilliant. These two things might sound mutually exclusive but, in mathematics professor and genius Jordan Ellenberg’s hands, they’re simply delightful.” —January Magazine
“Nicely presented, by turns wistful and amusing, realistic and absurd, The Grasshopper King is full of small delights. An enjoyable, never predictable romp which doesn’t quite settle for merely going for laughs but actually manages considerably more.” —Complete Review
“From Coffee House Press comes The Grasshopper King, Slate columnist Jordan Ellenberg’s wryly funny Boyle-cun-Borges satire about a crabby, untalented, yet mysteriously important Kafka-like poet and the two academics who wreck their lives by trying to explain him. We laughed more than a few times, and crown King as the best thing we’ve read all month.” —The Rake
“Very funny, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and yet still had a very serious point to make as well as an interesting, complex storyline. I love fictional poets, and fictional Eastern European countries, so a fictional Eastern European poet, especially a hilariously grumpy, hostile, and untalented one, was just my cup of tea.”
—Caleb Wilson, Davis-Kidd Booksellers
“A brilliant debut: Jordan Ellenberg’s The Grasshopper King is perhaps the funniest and best-written ‘college’ novel I’ve read since Pale Fire—with a considerably more appealing cast of characters than Nabokov’s.” —John Barth
“Jordan Ellenberg’s one of the funniest, flashiest, zaniest, cleverest and also one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable new young writers around. His first novel, The Grasshopper King, sometimes seems to have been written by the Marx Brothers; other times it’s just strong, sharp satire and a good story. If it brings half the laughs and enjoyment to the reader as it did to me, it’ll be pure pleasure.” —Stephen Dixon
First novelist and former math whiz kid Jordan Ellenberg uses a form that is not new, but he has fun with a fresh and original premise and a narrator whom we like although we may not believe everything he tells us. — Kit Reed
A prominent scholar who stops speaking in the late 1960s is the unlikely central figure of this clever campus satire, the debut of a young Princeton mathematics professor. Thirteen years after Prof. Stanley Higgs mysteriously clams up, Sam Grapearbor joins the Ph.D. program at the mediocre Western university of Chandler State. It's his job to encourage Higgs to talk again-an essential task, because Higgs is a revered scholar of the Gravinian poet Henderson, a misfit literary figure from a fictional Soviet republic-and is expected to produce at least one more pronouncement of genius. Meanwhile, Sam is laboring over a translation of Gravinian nursery rhymes, most concerning a character called Little Bug. Ellenberg's offbeat premise gives rise to plenty of witty observations and absurd situations (for example, Higgs's entire house is wired with tape recorders in case he decides to speak) that recall masters like Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The interlarded Henderson lore can grow tedious, as can Higgs's silence. Fortunately, Ellenberg balances his Nabokovian devices with poignant human relationships. Sam devotes much thought to whether he should marry his college girlfriend, Julia, who accompanies him to Higgs's home every day, while the distinct tenderness between mute Higgs and his patient wife, Ellen-and their mutual craziness-provides an unconventional but oddly appealing model of married life. Campus novels often tend toward the parochial or the arcane, but Ellenberg breathes fresh air into the genre. (Apr.) Forecast: Ellenberg has a regular column in the online journal Slate, which may help him in terms of name recognition. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Stanley Higgs, Chandler State University professor of Gravinic studies and the foremost expert on Henderson, the mysterious Gravinic poet who influenced such notables as Brecht and B ll, is not talking. The Henderson Society is so sure that Higgs's next utterance will be significant that its members have wired his house and hired a full-time graduate student to keep tabs on him. Having drifted through most of his college career, Samuel Grapearbor discovers Gravinic language and literature and ends up with the job of monitoring Higgs. Henderson has never been seen, and Higgs's attempts to contact him have all resulted in dead ends, but even when Henderson is rather fantastically implicated in the start of World War II, Higgs doesn't hold forth. Throughout all of this, Samuel is redefining his life with girlfriend Julia, Higgs's wife is dealing stoically with the situation, and the Gravinic Studies Department carries on. This first novel by Slate columnist Ellenberg, a mathematics professor at Princeton, is not quite funny enough to be true farce and not quite realistic enough to be seious. But Ellenberg handles relationships nicely. Recommended for larger libraries.-Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Slate.com journalist Ellenberg, a well-known Princeton mathematician, debuts with this tale of a deranged scholar out west who devotes his life to the study of the worst poet in history. We're introduced to the woebegone campus of Chandler State University, founded in 1871 on the site of the gold mine where prospector Tip Chandler struck it rich. The mine played out decades ago, but the college remains: an island of intellectual mediocrity in a ghost town in the middle of the desert. Chandler is famous for only one thing: its world-renowned Department of Gravinics, dedicated to the study of a Monaco-sized country in the Carpathian Mountains that was swallowed up in the 1920s by the Soviet Union. Gravine's most famous poet was an English expatriate named Henderson, and the world's foremost Henderson scholar is Chandler's own Stanley Higgs, a Chandler alum who discovered a stash of Henderson's poetry in Berlin and returned to Chandler to codify the manuscripts. The fact that Henderson's poetry is considered unreadable by just about everyone makes his discovery only more of an event, and soon Higgs has become a star in his own right, attracting students from both coasts and abroad. But, like many an academic superstar, Higgs has his personality quirks, the most notable being his refusal to speak. At first he's merely taciturn, but eventually he gives up on talking altogether-with disastrous results for his lectures, of course, and for the university, which is desperate to regain the services of its most prized teacher. A surveillance squad is assigned to monitor Higgs around the clock for signs of vocal return. Meanwhile, Higgs's dogged research into the whereabouts of Henderson (who maystill be alive) begins to bear fruit. Will Henderson himself speak again before Higgs does? And, more to the point, will either one have anything worthwhile to say? Nicely done and genuinely funny though overlong: a satire that would benefit from Polonius's famous dictum: "Brevity is the soul of wit."
