Top 10 Contemporary Campus Novel Accordding to Flavorwire

1. The Art of Fielding  -  Chad Harbach
2. On Beauty -Zadie Smith
3. Possession: A Romance -A. S. Byatt
4. Straight Man – Richard Russo
5. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
6. Moo – jane Smiley
7. Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers
8. Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain - Jeffrey Moore
9. The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates
10. The Secret History -Donna Tartt

 1. The Art of Fielding  -  Chad Harbach

 

 Henry Skrimshander begins the novel as a 17-year-old playing on a Legion baseball team in Lankton, South Dakota. Although physically short and not muscular, Henry has an unusual gift for fielding, and excels at the demanding position of shortstop. After playing a game against a team from Chicago, Westish College student Mike Schwartz sees Henry play and recruits him to attend Westish and improve the baseball team. By his junior year, Henry is excelling as a player (especially on defense) and is drawing significant attention from Major League Baseball scouts.

Westish College is a small liberal arts college located in northeastern Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Michigan. The school has a particular attachment to author Herman Melville, ever since a Westish student named Guert Affenlight discovered that Melville had visited Westish as part of a lecturing tour in the 1880s. The school re-branded itself around the Melville visit, erecting a statue of the author and renaming its sports teams as the Harpooners. After publishing a well-received book and spending many years as a professor at Harvard, Affenlight returns to his alma mater as president of the college. His estranged daughter Pella comes to live with him during Henry's junior year, after leaving her architect husband and life in San Francisco.
Much of the novel focuses around members of the Westish baseball team, during their best season in the history of the college. As Henry approaches the NCAA record for most consecutive errorless games by a shortstop (held by his baseball hero, Aparicio Rodriguez), a throw of his goes awry and hits his roommate, right fielder Owen Dunne, who is sitting in the dugout at the time. Owen is hospitalized by the injury, an incident which shakes Henry's confidence deeply. His fielding quickly deteriorates to the point where he can no longer complete a simple throw to first base. Examples given in the novel of Major League players with similar situations are Steve Blass, Mackey Sasser, Mark Wohlers, Chuck Knoblauch, Steve Sax, and Rick Ankiel.

Off the baseball field, the novel explores the relationships between several pairs of people. This includes romantic relationships between Mike Schwartz and Pella Affenlight, as well as one between Owen Dunne and Guert Affenlight. The mentor-student relationship between Schwartz and Henry also comes to the forefront, as each examines their hopes for the future and the extent to which it rests on their baseball ability.


2. On Beauty -Zadie Smith

 On Beauty centres on the story of two families and their different, yet increasingly intertwined, lives. The Belsey family consists of university professor Howard, a white Englishman, his African-American wife Kiki, and their children Jerome, Zora and Levi, living in the fictional university town of Wellington, outside Boston. Howard's professional nemesis is Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian living in Britain with his wife Carlene and children Victoria and Michael.

The Belsey family has always defined itself as liberal and atheist, and Howard in particular is furious when his son Jerome, a newly born-again Christian, goes to work as an intern with the ultra-conservative Christian Kipps family over his summer holidays. After a failed affair with Victoria Kipps, Jerome returns home. However, the families are brought into proximity again nine months later when the Kippses move to Wellington, and Monty begins work at the university.

Carlene and Kiki become friends despite the tensions between their families. Rivalry between Monty and Howard increases as Monty challenges the liberal attitudes of the university on issues such as affirmative action. His academic success also highlights Howard's inadequacies and failure to publish a long-awaited book. Meanwhile, the Belsey family is facing problems of its own, as they deal with the fallout of Howard's affair with his colleague and family friend Claire.

Zora and Levi both become friends with Carl, an African-American man of a poorer background than their own middle-class lifestyle. Zora uses him as a poster child for her campaign to allow talented non-students in university classes.

 3. Possession: A Romance -A. S. Byatt

 Obscure scholar Roland Michell, researching in the London Library, discovers handwritten drafts of a letter by the fictional eminent Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, which lead him to suspect that the married Ash had a hitherto unknown romance. He secretly takes away the documents – a highly unprofessional act for a scholar – and begins to investigate. The trail leads him to Christabel LaMotte, a minor poet and contemporary of Ash, and to Dr. Maud Bailey, an established modern LaMotte scholar and distant relative of LaMotte.

Protective of LaMotte, Bailey is drawn into helping Michell with the unfolding mystery. The two scholars find more letters and evidence of a love affair between the poets (with evidence of a holiday together during which – they suspect – the relationship may have been consummated); they become obsessed with discovering the truth. At the same time, their own personal romantic lives – neither of which is satisfactory – develop, and they become entwined in an echo of Ash and LaMotte. The stories of the two couples are told in parallel, with Byatt providing letters and poetry by both of the fictional poets

 

 4. Straight Man – Richard Russo

In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo p. erforms his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist-- and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.

In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television.  All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo--side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down

 

 5. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon

Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land Downstairs, which was published seven years earlier. On the eve of a college-sponsored writers and publishers weekend called WordFest, Tripp's wife walks out on him, and he learns that his mistress, the chancellor of the college, Sara Gaskell, is pregnant with his child.

To top it all off, Tripp finds himself involved in a bizarre crime committed by one of his students, an alienated young writer named James Leer. During a party, Leer shoots and kills the chancellor’s dog and steals her husband’s prized Marilyn Monroe collectible: the jacket worn by the actress on the day of her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

6. Moo – jane Smiley

Chapter one of Moo introduces Old Meats, a building at the center of the campus of Moo University no longer in use. However, Old Meats is home to a huge hog named Earl Butz whose only purpose in life is to eat as much as he would like in order to grow as large as possible as part of an experiment conducted by Dr. Bo Jones. Bob Carlson, a sophomore at Moo U, cares for Earl.

Chapter two introduces the Dubuque House, a large residence hall on campus and four of its newest residents Mary, Keri, Sherri and Diane. It is move-in day, and each of the four girls briefly reflects on what has brought them to Moo University and their hopes for their college careers. Timothy Monahan, a professor of English, is returning to the campus for the beginning of the school year. He meets one of the new faculty members, Spanish professor Cecelia Sanchez, when their classes end up being in neighboring rooms.

Marly Hellmich is an adult woman who works in the university cafeteria and lives at home caring for her elderly father. Marly also volunteers at her church, where she meets Nils Harstad, the dean of the agricultural extension. Later in Part One, Nils decides that what he needs to complete his life is a wife and a large family of small children. He decides that Marly would be the perfect mate and proposes to her. Marly contemplates the engagement and decides to accept on the basis that a life with Nils, a successful and economically stable older man, would offer her all of the things that she would not be able to have on her own; she believes she will become a kind of Cinderella.

7. Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers

The main narrative tells the story of Powers' return to his alma mater – referred to in the novel as simply "U.", but clearly based on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school Powers attended and teaches at as a professor – after he has ended a long and torrid relationship with a loving but volatile woman, referred to as "C." Powers is an in-house author for the university, and lives for free for one year. He finds himself unable to write any more books, and spends the first portion of the novel attempting to write, but never getting past the first line.

Powers then meets a computer scientist named Philip Lentz. Intrigued by Lentz's overbearing personality and unorthodox theories, Powers eventually agrees to participate in an experiment involving artificial intelligence. Lentz bets his fellow scientists that he can build a computer that can produce an analysis of a literary text that is indistinguishable from one produced by a human. It is Powers' task to "teach" the machine. After going through several unsuccessful versions, Powers and Lentz produce a computer model (dubbed "Helen") that is able to communicate like a human.
 

It is not clear to the reader or to Powers whether she is simulating human thought, or whether she is actually experiencing it. Powers tutors the computer, first by reading it canonical works of literature, then current events, and eventually telling it the story of his own life, in the process developing a complicated relationship with the machine.

8. Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain - Jeffrey Moore

It's by no means clear just how much control Jeremy Davenant has over his own destiny. He believes that the blueprint of his future exists on a page torn out of a book chosen randomly twenty-two years ago, in a literary game of blindman's buff orchestrated by his scoundrel uncle Gerard. The Page is from an encyclopedia, and is supposed to chart out his life, which may or may not explain why the Zulu tyrant Shaka, the Indian love epic Shakuntala, and the Ukrainian town Shakhtyorsk all start to feature in his life-along with William Shakespeare and, of course, his dark lady.

Romantic and fatalistic, Jeremy finds himself teaching Shakespeare at a university, living in an apartment owned by Ukrainians, and waiting for his destiny to unfold. And unfold it does: one glance from a dark lady in the street below, and his life veers into chaotic mischance and misadventure. The woman is half-Indian, half-Czech Milena, who is even more mysterious than Shakespeare's own ladylove. And although Milena is ambivalent and complex, and requires as much decoding as the Page, Jeremy stumbles after her in his determination to follow his fate.

 9. The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates 

 Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at its edges, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent and a powerful curse besets the families of the elite–their daughters begin disappearing. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.

When a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince, who might just be the devil, abducts a young bride on the verge of the altar, her brother sets out against all odds to find her. His path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House, soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power, the young idealist Upton Sinclair and his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Mark Twain–all of whom are plagued by "accursed" visions.

 10. The Secret History -Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.