Description
The Academy of Reality
by Steve Putnam
ISBN: 978-1-956440-99-7 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-00-7 ebook $9.99
October 15, 2024
A quest for institutional survival, two subversive corporate employees, Sid Sidney a technician and Mia Monroe a would-be shadow artist, get caught up in the undertow of office-speak and bastardized metrics tracking printer glitches, insurance profits, lab’s birdseed expenses, and pigeons’ ping pong scores. HR makes things worse, tasking Sid and Mia to co-author an employee benefits booklet, Fifty Places to Picnic.
Mia’s bio clock and Sid’s world population clock blip in-the-moment numbers on tablets, a battle of Darwinian proportions. Although humans and pigeons already overpopulate the Institute, Mia wants a baby.
Praise from readers of Steve Putnam’s The Academy of Reality:
Immediately distinctive writing, with a deadpan, linguistically inventive voice that has a dark view of the world.… it’s brilliant and should be praised as unlike anything that’s gone before.
—Roger King, author of Horizontal Hotel, A Girl from Zanaibar, and Love and Fatigue in America
The Institute is every working stiff’s nightmare: an insurance and investment conglomerate driven by arbitrary metrics and governed by equally arbitrary rules, such as one that reimburses staff for expenditures on pomegranates and dates, but not on apples and raisins. Inside the belly of this dystopian enterprise, subversive employees Sid and Mia are tasked with writing a morale-boosting booklet, Fifty Places to Picnic, that takes them on “outings” into the warrens of the corporate campus from its rotunda to its cellar. The pair guide readers of Steve Putnam’s delightfully madcap novel, The Academy of Reality, as the author skewers the Orwellian technocracy that the American workplace is rapidly becoming. A literary tale as zany as it is unsettling, featuring pigeons named Penguin and computerized therapists gone berserk, Putnam’s debut serves up a compelling tale of post-industrial mayhem. The Academy of Reality is simultaneously gripping entertainment, powerful warning and incentive to quit one’s job and read.
—Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House
The Academy of Reality is a delightful romantic romp through corporate America—a pointed, poignant screwball comedy for the 21st century. Steve Putnam is a gifted and original writer and a master storyteller!
—Jay Neugeboren, award-winning author of After Camus and Imagining Robert
Steve Putnam living the dream: Farm kid, Navy E3, small-town GM mechanic, framing carpenter, and an onsite printer tech at a large corporate account. When the printers were all working, he hid out in a chain link cage, his basement shop, and wrote the first draft of The Academy of Reality. No one at Corporate knew they were funding a novel about the strange ways of big business. For outstanding customer service, Putnam won “Tech of the Year” and a trip to Arizona. (As a novel-in-progress, a version of this novel was shortlisted in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Competition in New Orleans.) Visit his website steveputnamauthor.com
kpdavis –
A fun satire set in a near future corporate run society. We laughed as we cried, because the idiocy is sometimes a little to nearly real!