Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When “An Expensive Education”, a novel by Nick McDonell ’06-’07 came out this summer, Harvard was, once again, fictionalized and seen anew through the eyes of a recent graduate...
...while McDonell explained that his focus was on writing an engaging spy novel rather than on representing the setting where so much of the novel unfolds, a number of young authors who choose to write about Harvard instead decide to incorporate the institution into their own stories...
...Wurtzel conceived of her memoir idea when the form was much less popular than it is today. “Any memoirs were pretty much written by famous people,” she says. “I was encouraged to either turn it into a novel or make it more of a sociological study of depression in young people or something...
...Characters in “An Expensive Education” are forever gazing up Annenburg’s spires, and McDonell name-checks Square restaurants and student organizations in his third novel. But beyond casual allusion is the more challenging task of describing things not obvious to anyone but those familiar with Harvard. Sometimes this means defining terms like concentration or TF with a jab at Harvard’s refusal to conform. Sometimes that means dispelling rumors...
...Although Keith A. Gessen ’97, the author of “All The Sad Young Literary Men,” is a novelist, the sentiments he conveys through his characters are indeed tied to his own feelings about his Harvard experience. In his 2008 novel, one of the things Gessen hoped to convey in a protagonist’s flashbacks to his days at Harvard was the letdown Gessen experienced when he realized the college of his dreams was not what he had imagined...