Degrees of Absurdity — A Novel by Jeff Sullivan
Satire
Degrees of Absurdity
A Novel
Jeff Sullivan
A Campus Satire · Coming May 2027
A working-class kid cons his way into America’s most elite university. By the time the world shuts down in the spring of 2020, he realizes he’s far from the only fraud on campus.
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The Book
Apollo Apate did not earn his place at Halbridge University. He knows it every hour of every day.
Raised by a single mother, he arrives from Yorktownster, Massachusetts, certain that an elite education is his lifeline. What he finds instead is a campus devoted to every injustice except the one he grew up in. Professors preach about the disadvantaged and don’t recognize one sitting in the first row. Students police each other’s language while a boy who could have been him slides quietly toward violence. The only honest man in the place is a physicist the university is preparing to destroy.
Apollo came to Halbridge to escape poverty. When the world shuts down in March, he has to decide whether to keep what he stole.
A poor kid, a rich school, and an education neither of them planned on.
“Apollo Apate knew that in America, you’re either famous, college-educated, or a construction worker. But he was still unsure which one he’d become while he was on his way to Halbridge University on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 2019.”