Rare Days In Lost Valley

About the Book

In a beautiful weekend in June, a group of academics meet at Bellwether University in Lost Valley for an International Conference on Multicultural Initiatives. When an underemployed scholar of English literature and a computer programmer scheme to solidify their relations with the women they love, they enmesh themselves in a tangle of plots that involve the personification of a famous scholar, the theft of a cigar store Indian, and an attempt to enter the school’s mascot, a pit bull, in the local dogfights.

The characters include a Dean who began his career escorting young ladies at their comings out, the Dean’s unacknowledged English daughter, an inarticulate Head of Communications who loves dogs and goldfish, a President with high ambitions but confused intelligence, a visiting Australian with a problematic accent, a misty poet, an uncertain feminist, a gushing multiculturalist, the Chinese innkeeper who reluctantly hosts the conference, and a sinister professor of English whose multiple schemes are fittingly rewarded at the end.

About the Author

George Perkins’s most recent book is Stones Stand, Waters Flow, a memoir and history. Forthcoming is the 12th edition of The American Tradition in Literature, written with Barbara Perkins, fifty years in print and one of the favorite college textbooks of all time. Others include The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Women’s Work, and Contemporary American Literature. He has taught in the United States, Scotland, Australia, and China, and has been a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Newcastle in Australia and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He and Barbara are honored in the name of The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature’s annual Perkins Prize for the Best Book in Narrative Studies. For additional information see www.georgeperkins.net.