My Education - Softcover

Choi, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780721749 ISBN 13: 9781780721743

Publisher: Short Books Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

In the heat of September, and the heady rush of starting her graduate degree, Regina Gottlieb is entranced by her seductive, controversial English professor, Nicholas Brodeur. Against all advice, she becomes embroiled in his world, only to betray him in a passionate love affair with the person closest to him. Their romance destroys the equilibrium of all those around them, and threatens to capsize their lives, as Regina and her lover struggle to bridge the gap between duty and desire, obsession and self-preservation. Only years later, when Regina - by now a married mother and bestselling novelist living in Brooklyn - crosses paths again with Nicholas, do we see the full impact of her first, devastating love. My Education is a classic coming-of-age novel with a delicious twist - one of the most intoxicating stories of erotic obsession fused with literary style to emerge in a long time.

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: You could say Susan Choi’s My Education is a novel of the academy, in which an impressionable graduate student has an affair with an older, charismatic professor; that’s a fair--if misleading and incomplete--description. My Education is more surprising than that because a) the professor with whom the heroine sleeps is not the one you might expect and b) the book is full of pithy observations you can’t stop nodding at, and writing you can’t help underlining. “You’re twenty-one! Do you know what I’d give to be that age again?” Regina’s older lover cries in exasperation. “Do you know what I’d give if you’d stop saying that?” Regina replies. Or: “We sprang into flight like the arrow released from the bow,” Choi writes, when the lovers are discovered nearly in flagrante. Full of brilliantly drawn supporting characters--Regina’s hippie stoner roommate who goes by his surname is a favorite--this sophisticated book is about sophisticated people who may be brainy about arts and letters but are closer to clueless when it comes to the complex affairs of the heart. --Sara Nelson

About the Author:

SUSAN CHOI's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2004 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2010 she received the PEN/W.G. Sebald award. She teaches at Princeton.

About this edition

• Publisher: Short Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1780721749
• ISBN 13: 9781780721743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400