Through the corridors of the Humanities and Sciences Towers of a university in southern Germany, rumors are swirling about the President, about her relationship with the Minister of Mysterium, her strange projects the Head-in-Progress, the Activated Eye, and the Gestation Chamber, her bizarre decrees and midnight meetings with the deans. These and other affairs the narrator, the President’s personal assistant, must investigate and report on. But for Thomas, sometimes known as Herr Abjectus (Gehülfe, Ausländer, Niemand, among other names), hired straight from his job as a pump jockey at Chet Darling’s Downtown Mobil Station in Fordyce, Arkansas, this won’t be easy. In the first place he’s a foreigner whose German isn’t exactly solid. In the second, the President, to whom he is dedicated, has turned up missing. And now there is a new rumor: someone is planning to assassinate her. “The stories that thrill us, if we will only admit to their pleasures, are the extravagant fantasies of an imagination at large in a universe whose dynamism is language and whose meaning lies as much in its own urge for creation as in ideas. Thus, Gogol, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Roussel, Leonora Carrington, Bioy Casares, Ionesco, Mrożek, Lem, Harry Mathews, Calvino, Kenneth Koch, Donald Barthelme – and, most recently, Tom Whalen, whose comic invention, apparent lightness, and gleeful malice have combined in his new novel to increase the fabulous literature of his predecessors.’ The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence. But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination. To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. I am grateful to him for having written it and to Ellipsis Press for having published it.” –Norman Lock