The Professor of Immortality

Product Description


Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute for Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, has abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and been out of contact for seven months.
Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist's bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him, even as she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage.


Review


"The Professor of Immortality is intimate and sweeping, funny and terrifying, and most of all dead-on in its observations of what it means to want to know everything about people we love while still being frightened of what we might find out: it's a detective story, and a story of motherlove. Eileen Pollack is a splendid writer."-- "Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway"


"The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and--maybe even trickier--of trying to be a decent mom. It's also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest, and most companionable novelists out there."-- "Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances"


"In this exceptional novel, Eileen Pollack writes with great immediacy about the impact of grief on a parent's perception of the world. Tender, wry, full of unexpected revelations, The Professor of Immortality gripped me from the first scene, and the urgent questions it poses have stayed with me."-- "Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew"


"Pollack blends crime thriller and family drama into a provocative...novel."-- "Publishers Weekly"


About the Author


Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels Breaking and Entering (a New York Times Editor's Choice selection) and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, an award-winning book of nonfiction, and two creative-nonfiction textbooks. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. She is a professor on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Manhattan and Ann Arbor, Michigan.