![]() ![]() ``99'' is a classic innocents-abroad tale, in which an American anthropologist traveling in England discovers, to his delight, an ancient Druidic cult in a remote village. ![]() He's content to let things go on in this fashion indefinitely, and they probably would, but for his wife's preternaturally devious cat: Ever since he brought his mistress into the house, it seems, the cat has harbored some plan of revenge in her feline mind, and she succeeds in finally exposing him to his wife as the fraud that he is. Married to a tenure-track wife who commutes four days a week to her job in Chicago, he putters about haplessly in the sticks, writing a study of popular culture-``My (M)other the Car: Difference and Memory in Matriarchal Narrative''- and sleeping with one of his graduate students. ![]() The hero of ``Queen of the Jungle,'' a middle-aged professor in Iowa whose contract is about to run out, is a good example. ![]() Things go disastrously wrong for the very matter-of-fact academics who inhabit Hynes's world. Three original, droll, startling tales of horror in academia, by the author of the novel The Wild Colonial Boy (1990). ![]()
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