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"Every college I looked at, the students were like, 'Whoa, this place is awesome!' Then I came to Tripoli and everyone was like, 'I don't know. You get used to it. It's not so bad.' So I thought I might as well come here." - Adam Longman, Class of 2011
Tripoli College is a humble New England institution. Originally founded as a free school for Native Americans, it is now beset by financial problems and so has entered into an increasingly troubling financial relationship with a snack food corporation. Big Anna® deposes the college president, uses the campus as a testing ground for their latest "dietary and mood additive," and creates a field studies program in the Caribbean, where students in the (literal) field soon learn the true price of their Human Power Technology practices.
Set amidst this madness is a quasi love story, between Bill Brees, a dean going undercover as a student, utterly bemused by how things have changed since his undergrad days, and Maggie, an African American student startled into the realization that maybe nothing changes at all.
The Ghost Apple is told through a wealth of documents: tourism pamphlets, course catalogs, blog posts, historical letters, and slave narratives. Slowly, they reveal the extent of Tripoli's current crisis, and highlight those larger crises - of genocide, slavery, ignorance and indifference - on which the college and the nation were founded... and on which we continue to subsist.
"Starred Review. A droll comedy of modern manners, incisive without being angry, this satire within satire within satire will delight the right audience." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Academic satire meets anti-globalization polemic... [in] an improbable laugh riot." - Kirkus
"Insanely fun... [A] raucous adventure." - Booklist
"[Thier's] novel satirizes higher education, big business, slavery, medicine, and teenage angst with a razor-sharp wit. Readers will enjoy this complex story." - Library Journal
This information about The Ghost Apple was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Aaron Thier was born in Baltimore and raised in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he now lives with his wife. He is a graduate of Yale University and of the MFA program at the University of Florida. His writing has appeared in The Nation and The New Republic, among other places. This is his first novel.
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