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In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

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In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

By: Tobias Wolff
Narrated by: Anthony Heald
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About this listen

Tobias Wolff's masterful short story about one woman's quiet revenge on the pomposity and arrogance of academia.

Meticulous, funny, eccentric - Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless.

The closing of Brandon College, the institution she'd spent more than fifteen years at, changes everything. Forced to find another position, Mary finds herself at an experimental college in rainy Oregon. Sickly and unhappy, Mary feels as if she's dying - until a letter from an old colleague holds promises of a bright future. Louise works for a prestigious school in upstate New York and wants to help her secure a position there. Excited, Mary flies across the country for an interview. But things aren't as they seem, and Mary, disenchanted with Louise's vanity and the futility of the university, for once, throws caution to the wind.

©1981 Tobias Wolff (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories American Literature
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i love this author's stories, they usually portray a series of events, then the endings come with a metaphor, changing the flavour of the entire text.
here, a story about anger and determination, in the face of an unfair system.

great realism with a twist

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This was a somewhat tedious account of a failing academic carreer. It was very short so listened to the end..but not recommended except to possibly other academics? Narration fast but Ok

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This is a very short story from a clearly talented and lauded author about a woman going to interview for a job at a college as a concession to their statute about at least interviewing women. When she discovers she never had an actual chance at the job she goes off script in her guest lecture, going on a racist and unsubstantiated tirade about the torture and murder of a preacher by the Native American people whose stolen land the college is on. Like, I'm all the way in for sticking it to the man and highlighting the plight of anyone in academia who isn't a cishet white man, but an (assumed) white woman going on a demonising and felacious rant about what I understand to be a confederacy of multiple tribal nations as if they are one inhuman people is not the way to go about it. Honestly, it feels like she basically did the thing the Kramer guy did -- going on an abhorrent outburst of racism because of a perceived wrong.

I just...don't know about this one folx. It's bad to be a sexist POS, but being racist or bigoted in any other way is also absolutely unacceptable, and suffering one kind of discrimination doesn't give you the right to do that to another group, regardless of intersections. It makes a mockery of what seemed to be the point of the story, and the way her lecture is handled and how it abruptly ends feels triumphant for her, so it doesn't seem to be making any commentary on how those who lack certain privilege still discriminate those who have equal or less privilege.

Am I way off here? No one else seems to have really addressed this issue, beyond one review saying she says some 'un PC stuff'. Maybe this is a case of this being the first thing of this author I've read and many others already being spellbound by his other work? I don't know.

Fighting Misogyny with Racism?

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