'School Days', "a Novel of Change, Loss, and Liberation"

School Days, the new book from acclaimed poet and publisher Jonathan Galassi, follows a young man and his life-altering experiences at a New England boarding school. Here, Galassi weaves a story that poses fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student. In this coming-of-age tale that navigates homosexual crushes and the politics of an elite community, the mysterious behavior of a brilliant classics teacher fascinates his students until charges against him begin to emerge. Capturing heady friendships and rivalries of boyhood, the pressures of growing up closeted, and the very sober realities of sex and sexual misconduct, School Days wades into the charged waters of privilege, legacy, and memory to deliver a deeply observed portrait.

Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago. Then Leverett’s headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories of attending Leverett in the sixties: the beautiful reaches of the campus, the constellation of boys whose lives were, at one point, knit up with his own, the support and friendship of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson, and above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie. Sam’s search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam’s assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago. As Sam circles ever closer to the truth, reconnecting with his now-aging peers and the mentors he once idolized, he begins to suspect that a circle of fellow alumni might be withholding important—even damning—revelations.