Cow Country is the account of one man's frantic pursuit of love and regional accreditation at a community college with issues. Set at a rural campus in the throes of demographic and existential crisis, this lyrical work stakes a formidable claim to being The World's First Community College Epic. The ePub and Kindle editions of this unique novel will be released April 15, 2015. Enjoy!
When a down-on-his-luck educational administrator arrives into the makeshift bus shelter of Cow Eye Junction, he finds a drought-stricken town and its community college on the precipice of institutional ruin. Struggling to navigate this strange world of bloated calf scrota, orgiastic math instruction, and onrushing regional accreditors, Charlie must devise a plan to lead Cow Eye Community College through the perils of continuous improvement to the triumphant culmination of world history.
Iconoclastic, wry, and ambitiously constructed, Cow Country is Adrian Jones Pearson's most American work yet, deftly blending the lunacies of contemporary academia with the tragic consequences of New World nation-building. A must-read for anyone who has ever worked at an institution of higher education, or attempted to straddle partisan lines, this insightful novel offers a poetic requiem for the loss of our humanity - and our humanities.
Cow Country is available for purchase in the following electronic formats:
Kindle - $7.99. | ||
ePub - $7.99. |
To request that your library purchase Cow Country for its collection, click here. You can also download the Library Fact Sheet and forward it to your favorite librarian directly.
"The firing lanes were long and at the far end of mine I could just make out the distant target that had been selected for me: a silhouette of an accreditor holding a clipboard with the visiting team's response to our most recent self-study report. The target was just close enough that I could still imagine the seething commentary with its high-handed tone and terse pronouncements and general insistence on using the Latin plural for scrotum. In my delirium the stationary silhouette seemed to be closing in, advancing on me with a deep and insidious menace. Grasping the pistol tightly, I cocked back the hammer and stared into the distance at the approaching specter of regional accreditation. At the onrushing shadow of childless irrelevance and a life of dull professionalism. Of CV-building. Of unchallenged innovation and efficiency for its own sake. Of a world where conflict really is paramount and vacuum cleaners still mean progress and where the comforts of taxidermy really are more valued than the unvanquished screams of a mother cow who has been separated from her three-month-old calf. Exhausted and confused, I looked at all of this and saw none of it."
- From Cow Country, Chapter 9: The Focus Group