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Book Summary and Reviews of My Education by Susan Choi

My Education by Susan Choi

My Education

by Susan Choi

  • Published:
  • Jul 2013, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and Flashlight.

egina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He's said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He's condemned on the walls of the women's restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Regina's mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina's misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"What Choi is after is the elusive territory of experience, the way people and events imprint us when we're young and then linger, exerting a subtle pressure over how we live our lives." —The Los Angeles Times

"My Education is a raw, wild, hurtling foray into the tangled realms of sexuality and self-knowledge. Susan Choi's vast gifts as a novelist are all on display, with her restlessness, curiosity and sheer daring leading the way." —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach

"When I finished Susan Choi's My Education, I nearly gasped. She had managed one of the most exquisite of the novelist's magic acts—produced a cogent, passionate, and surprising story, while acknowledging the ordinary, eroding aspects of lives lived daily. She had populated it with remarkable but utterly believable characters.  She had written lines that could be framed, and displayed at a sentence festival.  She has, in short, written an amazing book." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

This information about My Education was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Susan Choi

Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, American Woman, A Person of Interest, The Foreign Student, and The National Book Award winner, Trust Exercise. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn.

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