Nothing Was Real Until It Was Documented: A Darkly Comic Campus Satire About A Graduate Program Director Who Put It All In Writing — The Most Dangerous Thing Anyone Can Do At A University

If you're interested in what the lives of professors can be like, here's my first novel: Nothing Was Real Until It Was Documented. It's a "campus satire" heavily inspired by Kafka's The Trial and Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. At Bracket State University, nothing is real until it is documented, and nothing documented is ever quite real. Marian Vale has just earned tenure and promotion, which means the university has decided she is valuable enough to keep and reliable enough to burden. Her reward is a new administrative role: Director of Graduate Continuity. On the twenty-third day of her first semester in the role, a student arrives with a Shakespeare problem. According to the catalog, Nora Pike has fulfilled a requirement. According to the degree audit, she has not. According to the university, both things are true until Marian can make the contradiction disappear. As the years pass, forms fail, committees multiply, promises evaporate, and documentation becomes both Marian's only defense and the university's favorite weapon. Part campus satire, part bureaucratic nightmare, Nothing Was Real Until It Was Documented is a darkly comic novel about academic labor, institutional memory, and the strange terror of proving what happened to the people who were there. https://a.co/d/0dpTwiQd