The Ghost Apple

Tripoli College sits in New England and began as a tuition-free school for Native American students. Today it struggles to stay afloat, and its leaders have tied its future to a snack food company whose ambitions reach well beyond candy and chips. The company ousts the college president, treats the campus as a laboratory for a new "dietary and mood additive," and launches a field studies program in the Caribbean, where students get hands-on lessons in the real cost of the firm's Human Power Technology.

At the center of this chaos is an unlikely romance. Bill Brees, a dean who has enrolled as a student in disguise, is baffled by how much the school has changed since he was an undergraduate. He is drawn to Maggie, an African American student who begins to suspect that very little has changed at all.

The story unfolds through a patchwork of documents, including tourism brochures, course catalogs, blog entries, historical letters, and slave narratives. Piece by piece, these materials expose the depth of Tripoli's present troubles and point back to the violence on which the college and the nation were built: genocide, slavery, ignorance, and indifference, all of which the book argues still shape the present.