The Dean's List: A Novel - Tapa dura

The former pianist for the Icejam Quintet, Leland Edwards is now the dean of Rookery State College, fumbling with the mysteries of life and love as he struggles to cope with the strange campus events of the 1990s. By the author of Rookery Blues. Tour.

Times Book Review called Jon Hassler's last novel, Rookery Blues, "one of his finest and funniest novels." Now, Hassler brings back the delightful hero from that novel. He's older, not necessarily wiser, and still fumbling with love and life amid the strange campus doings of the 1990s.

Leland Edwards, a piano-playing, fly-fishing English professor, has become Dean of Rookery State College. And since the president of the college has been on automatic pilot for the last thirty years, it falls to Leland to save his beloved campus from diminished enrollment, hockey thuggery, and its ignoble associations with Paul Bunyan.

Then his old pal from the Icejam Quartet, Peggy Benoit Connor, drops a fund-raising plum in his lap. The most famous poet in America, Richard Falcon, has agreed to come to Rookery. Leland envisions thousands coming from all over the Midwest to hear Falcon's reading--an event that will put Rookery State on the literary map.

But when he arri