SCHOOL (Ray Levy)

“SCHOOL is a tour de force of deadpan wit, a delicious détournement in which Levy amusingly mingles (and mangles) various scholarly and cultural archives… This is cutting-edge academic satire of the highest order.”
—Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry

SCHOOL

A NOVEL

by Ray Levy

FC2 | October 12, 2023
$16.95 | 174 Pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978-1573662024

In his blistering new novel, SCHOOL (Oct. 12), Ray Levy doesn’t kiss the ring—he chews the damn finger off. Both an exorcism of contemporary academia, and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive, School incorporates a variety of forms, including conversations, interviews, a dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade, a lecture on queer theory transcribed by a dysphoric PhD student, a movie review of a YouTube video of a conference presentation on deconstruction, and more.

“I learned that gender dysphoria and academic dysphoria can overlap in ways that make them difficult to separate and name,” Levy writes, describing the book’s genesis. “I produced an initial draft before I was consciously aware that I wanted to become another gender; and I engaged the process of development and revision after I became conscious of my desire and had started to transition; the question of what to do with a pre-transition manuscript became a craft problem for me to solve, and an integral component of what the novel is about.”

The whole of SCHOOL then functions as a caustic ritual—a demonic attack that’s also slapstick satire. More specifically, it’s a sadistic text about the masochism enforced by the seminar room’s coercive seduction rites, about power and possession, about academic humiliation, and about using the material of one’s humbling to build a new vessel for capacious creative selfhood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RAY LEVY is also the author of Negative Space (Spiral Editions), A Book So Red (Caketrain), and Necessary Objects (Tree Light Books). Short fictions appear or are forthcoming in ANMLY, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Territory, SPORAZINE, Western Humanities Review, and others. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Prose, Levy is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington and a founding editor at Dreginald. He lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.