Welcome, Scholar
by JAKE FUCHS
Available Now! | Fiction / $16.95 | ISBN: 978-0-615-36555-8
English Ph.D. Derek Rosenblum, the hero of this comic, often shocking novel, can’t land a full-time teaching position. After too many years of marginal employment, he wonders: is Dulness, the moronic presiding deity of Alexander Pope’s great satiric Dunciad, somehow responsible for the series of misadventures that make up his life? She’s only a fiction, Derek tells himself, but he senses her presence everywhere. The authoritative figures he encounters—Lucia Luteplucker, his unhelpful adviser at Heartland U, Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher—impress him as her fleshly incarnations. They and others constantly thwart Derek, until he discovers just what the goddess wants and gives it to her. Soon he’s offered the job of his dreams, and happily tenured Full Professor Rosenblum spends thirty comfortable years boring students. Then, as Welcome, Scholar concludes, final catastrophe arrives.
Praise for Jake Fuchs’ Welcome, Scholar:
It is not a surprise that Fuchs’s protagonist is a likeable schlemiel; the surprise is that the novel’s symbolic center is Alexander Pope, especially the Dunciad. Fuchs’s novel even pastiches the master good-naturedly with its comical mock-epic characterizations and sequences. Welcome, Scholar is a witty, original-minded version of the academic novel.
–Harold Jaffe, author of Anti-Twitter and Induced Coma; Editor-in-Chief, Fiction International
Laugh and cheer on Derek Rosenblum as he deconstructs his own loneliness and becomes a mirror of how we live our lives, between we hope and regret. Welcome, Scholar is a winning performance.
–Stephen D. Gutuerrez, author of The Mexican Man in His Backyard
Books about educated people are rare these days. Books about academics are even more rare. And books about academics that are good are almost nonexistent. Then there’s Jake Fuchs and his marvelous Welcome, Scholar, the best book I have read in years, a book that actually make me think AND laugh out loud. Fuchs has entered the ranks of novelists working today who will be remembered for generations. And that’s not many, folks.
– Eric Miles Williamson, author of Welcome to Oakland and Say it Hot
About the Author:
A former professor of English, Jake Fuchs has written scholarly books, short fiction, two satiric mysteries, Death of a Dad and Death of a Prof, and the semi-autobiographical novel, Conrad in Beverly Hills. The son of Daniel Fuchs, the novelist and screenwriter, he lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Freya.