Bedtime Stories for Academics turns beloved myths and folklore into sharp, loving portraits of the modern university.
Toronto, ON – July 13, 2026 – Rumpelstiltskin chairs the promotion and tenure board. Goldilocks faces three peer reviewers (too harsh, too vague, and just plain confusing). Huck Finn fakes his own death to avoid writing one more grant proposal. And Professor Sisyphus? He’s still pushing — the committee work, like the boulder, never stays done. Welcome to Typical University, the setting of Bedtime Stories for Academics: Quibbles and Squabbles at Typical University (University of Toronto Press, August 18, 2026, $29.95), a wickedly funny new collection by satirist Talia Argondezzi.
Argondezzi – director of the writing and speaking program at Ursinus College and frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and The New Yorker – transforms the stories of Mother Goose, Greek myth, and classic literature into irreverent parables of campus life. Across six sections spanning the full academic job description – tenure, research, teaching, service, and “other duties as assigned” – the collection takes on the anxieties that keep faculty, staff, and graduate students up at night: the scarcity of tenure-track jobs, the precarity of contingent labour, shrinking budgets, ever-expanding committee work, and the simultaneous vilification and commodification of higher education.
Arriving as campus comedies like HBO’s hit Rooster dominate the cultural conversation, Bedtime Stories for Academics offers the insider’s version — a biting satire written from inside the faculty meeting. The humour is as affectionate as it is sharp, puncturing the absurdities of the modern university while honouring the people who keep it running. “Working in academia has been the great privilege of my life,” Argondezzi writes in the book’s preface. “Truly, I have the best job in the world, and if I could time-travel, I would choose it over and over again.”
Highlights include “Cinderadjunct,” “A Powerful Genie Attempts to Secure Aladdin a Tenure-Track Position,” “Hester Prynne Demands Her Scarlet ‘A’ Be Changed to an ‘A+,’” “Jack and Beanstalk, the University’s New Learning Management System,” and “Professor Rip Van Winkle Awakens to Find the Culture Has Changed.” The collection closes with a set of book club discussion questions as irreverent as the stories themselves, making it an ideal gift for academics at every career stage and an astute companion for anyone who has ever found the modern university equal parts maddening and beloved.
Bedtime Stories for Academics: Quibbles and Squabbles at Typical University is available for purchase at utppublishing.com and major book retailers.