The twenty best campus novels, ranked

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

At LitHub she tagged--and ranked--the twenty best campus novels. Number two on the list:

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Oh, it’s a campus classic, one of the earliest and best examples of the form (at least as we understand it today), so we really can’t do without it—but why would we ever want to do without our bumbling, hapless émigré Professor Timofey Pnin, who struggles through a series of academic struggles and foibles in high comedic fashion? It’s not the greatest novel Nabokov ever wrote, but it may be his most charming—his Orlando, if you will.

Read about another entry on the list.

Pnin is among Elizabeth McKenzie's ten best squirrels in literature, W.B. Gooderham's ten favorite examples of book-giving in fiction and Matthew Kaminski's five best novels about immigrants in America, and Nabokov is on Ben Frederick's list of ten influential authors who came to the US as immigrants.

--Marshal Zeringue