The Adjunct

From the acclaimed author of How to Be Eaten, a fresh take on the campus novel that follows an adjunct professor gigging her way through academia’s poor job market when she crosses paths with her old PhD adviser, whose new novel might be about her—for readers of Worry, Vladimir, and Less. Sam, an adjunct professor at a public university in Baltimore, takes a last-minute gig at the private liberal arts college down the road. Overworked and underpaid, she lives in a blur of back-to-back classes, side hustles, and job applications for an ever-dwindling number of tenure-track positions. Her already precarious existence is thrown into disarray when she runs into her former grad school adviser, Dr. Tom Sternberg, on campus. Tom and Sam have a complicated history, and it’s the last thing she wants to think about as she navigates academic politics, institutional hurdles, and romantic entanglements with men and women that further complicate a sexuality not even she can define. Then she learns that Tom left his old job for undisclosed reasons—and his long-awaited second novel is about a professor reckoning with his checkered past. As rumors spread that Sam is the inspiration behind a central character, she fights to regain control of the story. A hilarious yet sobering look at how hustle culture has come to define modern academia, The Adjunct offers a bold twist on a tangled MeToo story and turns Sam’s downward spiral into a searing critique of class and the hollow promises of the American dream.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Disarmingly deft, surprisingly suspenseful, and full of delicious rage and language play. I have been waiting a long time for this satisfying novel about the crumbling of academia and the truth-warping storm of labor exploitation and intellectual grifting it leaves behind. A stay-up-all-night page-turner and a burning indictment of the creative class's addictions and fantasies. I inhaled this book." - Emma Copley Eisenberg

"Maria Adelmann takes the campus novel to new, jittery, and visceral places with The Adjunct. This darkly comic novel is anxiety-provoking in the best of ways as it explodes the seamy guts of the academy, unravels the fabric of MeToo, and bursts the mystique of authorial intent. Adelmann's titular adjunct, Sam, feels so real that I bit my cheeks to shreds as her life implodes over and over until the jaw-dropping end. Beyond the visceral reading experience, I have to applaud the novel's craft, the cochlear structure that whirls in upon itself, only to finish in an open space. I loved the literary doubling, the mille-feuille of textual references, and the constant, inescapable thrum of late-stage capitalism." - Chelsea G Summers

"A good writer might have a stance on some of the important issues of their time; a great writer will push the conversation further, as Maria Adelmann has done with The Adjunct. It's an outrageous, smart novel about the rat race of academia, the MeToo movement, and debt from a writer whose masterful sleight of hand is saying the quiet parts loud, who is not afraid to sit in the uncomfortable gray space - and to paint it with even more hues. Conversational yet piercing, this is a powerful portrait of a woman in dire circumstances. This book has bite and one of the most damning endings I've ever read. I'm obsessed." - Katie Yee