Slipsliding by the Bay

by Barbara McDonald

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Pub Date Jul 18 2017 | Archive Date Jul 11 2017

She Writes Press

General Fiction (Adult) | Humor & Satire

Description

Perched on the edge of San Francisco, Lakeside College is experiencing an identity crisis. John Gudewill is recruited as president to save the college from possible closure—but he is flummoxed at every turn. The faculty, led by secretive English professor Eliot Blanc, is determined to unionize. The alumni want Lakeside to return to its former status as a women-only college. Meanwhile, Sister Magdalena, the college’s infamous artist, is waging war against corporate America through her art, and the students are engaging in their own warfare through sit-ins and protests. With the college besieged on all sides, what is its new president to do? A hilarious spoof of academic intrigue, Slipsliding by the Bay mirrors the societal turmoil and follies of the seventies.

Advance Praise

"With a sharp eye for detail and a complement of perfectly peculiar characters, Barbara McDonald has devised a wonderful satire of the academic world. Her portrait of a small liberal arts college―its lecheries and larcenies―exactly conjures the atmosphere of that unique modern institution where absurdity and logic are married so closely: the campus."
―Louis B. Jones, author of California’s Over, Particles and Luck, and Radiance

“Intriguing. You got me hooked with the moving plot and interesting characters. I was curious to see what mischief Gudewill and Stein would cook up. Magdalena and Lucy continued to surprise.”
―Louis Owens, author of Sharpest Sight and Bone Game

“Barbara McDonald’s Slipsliding by the Bay is an absorbing novel. A comedy both dark and light, it recounts an often wild search for survival of an embattled small college in 1970s San Francisco. The battle is within: a new president recruited to save the college, diverse students, faculty and alums, and most engagingly, a famed artist Sister Magdalena, whose sculptures embody a fierce war against corporate America, notably the college’s chairman of the board. McDonald’s gift for lively dialogue carries the college from one crisis to another, the denouement in suspense until the very end. An intriguing read from start to finish.”
―John Boettiger, author of A Love in the Shadows

“I am always cautious when approaching a novel written by a published poet but Barbara McDonald made reading Slipsliding by the Bay easy for me. Enticing and entertaining, I read it with mounting pleasure.”
―Chester Aaron, author of About Us