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.

Turtle Point Press'first 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 a scientist's eye.

George Stadelives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. He has edited numerous scholarly books, and he has published many reviews and articles in journals such as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review. He is a consulting editor of Barnes &Noble Classics. His previous murder mystery, Confessions of a Lady Killer, was published by W.W. Norton. The New York Timescalled it "a novel that bristles with irony and wit,"and The Washington Postpraised its "Nabokovian control of language."

"Members of Professor Wynn O'Leary's English department at a Columbia-like university on Manhattan's Upper West Side are being knocked off by someone with an animus toward academe and a wicked knowledge of poetry in this mystery — cum — academic satire in the form of an epistolary novel from Columbia professor Stade (Confessions of a Lady Killer). O'Leary's letters to his dead brother, Joel, recount the deaths of his colleagues, his new love interests and his battle to overcome a decade of impotence. Stade's portrait of a po-mo English department, circa 1990, is hilariously funny, the sendup of academic politics perfectly pitched. (Think Richard Russo meets Amanda Cross.) O'Leary is the novel's hero in every sense of the term — winsome, vulnerable, tough, utterly compelling. You'll wish he could walk out of the book and take you to dinner. But for all that, the tale is far from perfect. The supporting characters are hard to keep straight, even with the aid of a preface that lists the 'Major players'; the unmasking of the murderer comes as no surprise; and the epistolary device is just that — a device, whose purpose never organically meshes with the heart of the novel. Agent, Timothy Seldes at Russell and Volkening." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Born in New York City, 1933; PhD Columbia University with dissertatino on Robert Graves. Taught Classics of Moderninst fiction, Modern Criticism and more. Published hundreds of reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review. Editorial Director, Barnes &Noble Classics