School Days A Novel

The new novel from the acclaimed poet and publisher asks fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student.

Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago.
    Then Leverett’s headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories, above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie and the support of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson.
    Sam’s search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam’s assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago.

Jonathan Galassi is the chairman of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a former poetry editor for the Paris Review, a former chairman of the Academy of American Poets, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. He has published three books of poetry and translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. His first novel, Muse, was published in 2015.