The Grasshopper King
Reviews

January Magazine:
"The Grasshopper King is an exceptionally silly book. It's also quite brilliant. These two things might sound mutually exclusive but, in mathematics professor and genius Jordan Ellenberg's hands, they're simply delightful."

Complete Review:
"Much of its charm is in Ellenberg's amusing unexpected inventions along the way, and despite all the absurdities it offers remarkably realistic characters, warmly portrayed despite their many failings."

Library Bookwatch:
"A deftly woven debut novel about a languishing small town and its university, and an infamous poet who is either a blip on the radar or a literary genius with the key to the shape of history itself."

Putnam Journal News & Rockland Journal News:
"Ellenberg really shines when he scrutinizes, with hilarious insight, the relationship between Grapearbor and his girlfriend Julia. From their youthful courtship to adult decline, all the emotional thrusts and parries are faithfully captured: gratitude, adulation, imitation, boredom, silence, resentment, irritability and punitive celibacy."

ForeWor :
"Jordan Ellenberg offers the funniest send-up of academia since Jane Smiley's Moo. The novel reads as if Ellenberg had started out to write satire, contracted an uncontrollable bout of the giggles, and exploded into all-out farce."

Library Journal:
"Stanley Higgs, Chandler State University professor of Gravinic studies and the foremost expert on Henderson, the mysterious Gravinic poet who influenced such notables as Brecht and Boll, is not talking. The Henderson Society is so sure that Higgs's next utterance will be significant that its members have wired his house and hired a full-time graduate student to keep tabs on him.... Ellenberg handles relationships nicely."

Rain Taxi Review of Books online:
"[T]he funniest campus novel in ages, and a slippery, serious-minded investigation of what happens when good languages go bad. If that's not enough, the novel also offers sterling examples of competitive checkers; misguided institutional architecture; "ling-fic" (see below); syncretic cosmogonical folklore; and reasons why people regret ever leaving New York." What follows is Jordan and Stephen Burt (the interviewer) chewing over all manner of subject matter, from baseball to fiction to what the hell a dweeby math nerd is doing writing a column for the likes of the mother of all hip zines, Slate.

- www.raintaxi.com

New York Sun:
"The book is a zany send-up of campus life that focuses on Samuel Grapearbor, a young man transformed from a lost soul desperate to get out of his small university town (he dreams of living in New York), to a devoted scholar who translates stories with such titles as 'The Four Wives of Little Bug.'"

The Believer:
"Zany campus satire about a university with a lame basketball program whose only residual claim to fame is its Gravinics Department, dedicated to the study of an obscure European country's only notable export-the possibly untalented, possibly world-saving poet, Henderson. Speedy, smart, and winsome meditations on immortality and obscurity."

Playback St. Louis:
"Jordan Ellenberg-along with his debut, The Grasshopper King-may have a shot at catching a minor cult-status wave in the coming year."

Ripsaw:
"The Grasshopper King is clever without pretentiousness, filled with endearing absurdity, bittersweet feelings and quirky characters."

Boston Phoenix:
"This is a well-crafted novel with realistic characters, and, most important, a wild satire of campus politics. The humor is at times outrageous….and the hilarious finale is something out of a Preston Sturges screwball comedy."

Booklist:
"It is Ellenberg's keen sense of humor and propensity for drawing out the absurdity in collegiate obsessions that takes center stage in this very strange and over-the-top but amusing novel."

Publishers Weekly:
"A prominent scholar who stops speaking in the late 1960s is the unlikely central figure of this clever campus satire, the debut of a young Princeton mathematics professor.... Ellenberg's offbeat premise gives rise to plenty of witty observations and absurd situations...that recall masters like Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.... Campus novels often tend toward the parochial or the arcane, but Ellenberg breathes fresh air into the genre."

Manitou Messenger:
"Like reading Murakami, readers will find themselves in a world that is so absurd, yet so palpable. Writing with wit and cleverness, Ellenberg moves deftly among moments of poignancy, satire, and slapstick comedy."

Hybrid Magazine:
"Author Jordan Ellenberg has a knack for the absurd and peppers his book with darkly funny examples of Gravinic folklore, poems and songs. His biggest accomplishment by far, however, is creating a main character as consistently self-centered and misogynistic as Sam Grapearbor and somehow making him sympathetic."

Birchbark Books Web Site:
"Mr. Ellenberg was kind enough to spend an evening with us at Birchbark Books not that long ago. He read from his debut novel, The Grasshopper King, answered questions, and blessed us with his magnificent personality. Everyone at the bookstore who has read even just a small portion of The Grasshopper King is raving about it."

City Pages:
"Ultimately, it seems everyone touched by this poet, or the professor, or the language becomes miserable and mad…and in turn, more honest in describing how woefully funny the world truly is."

The Rake:
"From Coffee House Press comes The Grasshopper King, Slate columnist Jordan
Ellenberg's wryly funny Boyle-cun-Borges satire about a crabby, untalented,
yet mysteriously important Kafka-like poet and the two academics who wreck
their lives trying to explain him. We laughed more than a few times, and
crown King the best thing we've read all month."

Baltimore City Paper:
"Ellenberg's characters are genuinely likeable, and there is an undercurrent of conspiracies and machinations that keeps the narrative moving forward."

Splendid magazine:

"You buy into the whole silliness of the story because it's drafted so well, and there are some absolutely amazing literary touches."

KIRKUS REVIEWS, February 1, 2003 :

"Slate.com journalist Ellenberg, a well-known Princeton mathematician, debuts with this tale of a deranged scholar out west who devotes his life to the study of the worst poet in history.

"We're introduced to the woebegone campus of Chandler State University, founded in 1871 on the site of the gold mine where prospector Tip Chandler struck it rich. The mine played out decades ago, but the college remains: an island of intellectual mediocrity in a ghost town in the middle of the desert. Chandler is famous for only one thing: its world-renowned Department of Gravinics, dedicated to the study of a Monaco-sized country in the Carpathian Mountains that was swallowed up in the 1920s by the Soviet Union. Gravine's most famous poet was an English expatriate named Henderson, and the world's foremost Henderson scholar is Chandler's own Stanley Higgs, a Chandler alum who discovered a stash of Henderson's poetry in Berlin and returned to Chandler to codify the manuscripts. The fact that Henderson's poetry is considered unreadable by just about everyone makes his discovery only more of an event, and soon Higgs becomes a star in his own right, attracting students from both coasts and abroad. But, like many an academic superstar, Higgs has his personality quirks, the most notable being his refusal to speak. At first he's merely taciturn, but eventually he gives up on talking altogether-with disastrous results for his lectures, of course, and for the university, which is desperate to regain the services of its most prized teacher. A surveillance squad is assigned to monitor Higgs around the clock for signs of vocal return. Meanwhile, Higgs's dogged research into the whereabouts of Henderson (who may still be alive) begins to bear fruit. Will Henderson himself speak again before Higgs does? And, more to the point, will either one have anything worthwhile to say?

"Nicely done and genuinely funny though overlong: a satire that would benefit from Polonius's famous dictum: "Brevity is the soul of wit." "

"A brilliant debut: Jordan Ellenberg's The Grasshopper King is perhaps the funniest and best-written 'college' novel I've read since Pale Fire-with a considerably more appealing cast of characters than Nabokov's." -John Barth

"Jordan Ellenberg's one of the funniest, flashiest, zaniest, cleverest and also one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable new young writers around. His first novel, The Grasshopper King, sometimes seems to have been written by the Marx Brothers; other times it's just strong, sharp satire and a good story. If it brings half the laughs and enjoyment to the reader as it did to me, it'll be pure pleasure." -Stephen Dixon

"First novelist and former math whiz kid Jordan Ellenberg uses a form that is not new, but he has fun with a fresh and original premise and a narrator whom we like although we may not believe everything he tells us. The Grasshopper King is a traditional comic academic novel, complete with deranged deans and crass coaches and desperate professors trapped in the hinterlands…. Light, amusing and carefully crafted as it is, The Grasshopper King is a cautionary tale about the perils of precision. This seems sweetly appropriate, coming as it does from a writer whose primary discipline is mathematics." - The Washington Post