Pictures from an Institution

"A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power.... A delight of true understanding." - Wallace Stevens "I'm greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It's a remarkable book." - Robert Penn Warren "Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures... is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell's forte." - Mary Welp "One of the wittiest books of modern times." - New York Times "The father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that 'political correctness' was so deliciously dissected fifty years ago." - Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph "A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition.... Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd." - Edmund Fuller, Saturday Review "This is a searching novel about a mean lady novelist writing a mean novel about a college where she is spending a year teaching creative writing. It portrays a savage, lethal-tongued bluestocking, pitilessly intent on pinning down her colleagues as specimens in her already gruesome collection.... Mr. Jarrell is on the side of the angels. His is a divine meanness, and he exposes his female writing devil punitively, matching her stream of poisonous wisecracks with a series of coruscating cracks of his own worthy of Dorothy Parker at her most hilarious and deadly." - Francis Steegmuller, New York Times Book Review"