Lux Chen in New York City

"At night, I kept having this dream in which I went back to school to finish my doctoral degree but could not find my classroom. Once, when I finally followed the crowd into a giant, round auditorium, what greeted me was a sparkling black coffin at the center of the podium, surrounded by candles, flowers, and a children’s choir. It was not a class, but a stranger’s funeral. Or was the funeral for me?"

from Lux Chen's "How The Great Gatsby Saved My Life"

(This essay can also be read in Chinese.)

The Adjunct Novel at Inside Higher Ed

From Colleen Flaherty's "The Adjunct Novel" at Inside Higher Ed:

Alex Kudera, who has spent many years as a non-tenure-track professor of English, made waves in 2010 with his book about Cyrus “Duffy” Duffleman, a Philadelphia-area adjunct who travels around the city to five different jobs. Fight for Your Long Day traces Duffleman’s steps and the various indignities he experiences inside the classroom and out. He’s always running late, for example, and is wrongly accused of sleeping with a student by a college counselor, but still shows dedication to his work.

Kudera published Auggie’s Revenge, which touches on similar themes and features as adjunct as its central character, earlier this year. Hinting that some audiences aren’t quite ready for a full-on fictionalized takedown of adjunct issues, he said via email that his work might be “a more brutal version of socioeconomic America than relatively affluent urban readers like to see in their novels.”