Nevergreen

---

“An unsparing satire, at once funny and horrifying and compelling because it’s so real.”
–Howard Gordon, Emmy Award Winning Producer of Homeland, 24, The X-Files

“One part Lucky Jim and three parts One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Andrew Pessin’s terrific and terrifying novel may just be the great campus novel of our generation. Every page delivers a hearty laugh, and every laugh soon blooms into a painful stab of recognition, reminding us that we’re all stuck on Nevergreen. This one is a pure delight.”
–Liel Leibovitz, editor at large, Tablet Magazine

“Welcome to Nevergreen, a small college in full descent into madness. Intelligent and witty, with crackling dialogue and keenly planted in the cultural firmament, Nevergreen engages from start to finish. More Animal Farm than Animal House. Be prepared to be offended and like it.”
–Scott Johnston, author of Amazon bestseller, Campusland

“A sparkling and savagely satirical novel … To read this brilliant novel is to laugh—and to cry.”
–Melanie Phillips, journalist, broadcaster, author of The Legacy

“Sharp, funny, and ultimately scary, Nevergreen cuts right to the quick of campus cancel culture and the ideological excesses that generate it. It may officially be a satire but it may as well be a documentary, it’s so close to home. That something so serious can also be so entertaining is impressive.”
–William Jacobson, Cornell University

“A biting satire of a college campus driven literally mad with political correctness. Funny, disturbing, and thought-provoking, Nevergreen will change the way you look at college life.”
–Michael Satlow, Brown University

“Nevergreen is so painful I wanted to stop; yet so funny I kept going. Pessin has written a delirious yet detailed roman à clé for almost any campus today. Parody imitates life as Kafka wanders through Wokeland. In its own outrageous way, a triumph of sanity.”
–Richard Landes, Boston University

“Read Professor Pessin’s fantabulous book on the nuking of the college mind. It is Kafka’s Trial meets the movie American Pie, and it will make your sides heave with hilarity while your heart weeps over the horror that is ‘wokefulness.’ Read this book NOW, and then JOIN THE RESISTANCE.”
–Ze’ev Maghen, Shalem College 

“A rampage of a novel. Pessin’s nightmarish, all-too-real satire of contemporary academia is part Pynchon, part Kafka, and the most ominous campus horror tale since C. S. Lewis had demons infiltrate Edgestow University in That Hideous Strength.”
–Michael Weingrad, Portland State University

“Pessin’s sharp and clever appraisal of campus culture and its many excesses will make you laugh, but the main character’s ordeal sadly isn’t really so far-fetched. In fact, many academics—especially Jewish faculty, and a fair share of liberal-leaning scholars among them, like the book’s protagonist—will find what happens in this book all too familiar. Nevergreen does an outstanding job of mocking current campus dynamics, where even the slightest challenge to received wisdoms and political orthodoxies can generate a ferocious backlash, student-driven manufactured outrages, smear campaigns, and online mobbing. In this toxic environment, who can really blame faculty for keeping their head downs, their mouths firmly shut, and their identities a secret? Nevergreen is a spoof, but its takeaway messages are very serious. Everyone concerned with today’s forced conformity, self-censorship, and threats to academic freedom and campus free expression on America’s campuses needs to read this book!”
–Miriam F. Elman, Executive Director of the Academic Engagement Network, Inaugural Robert D. McClure Professor of Teaching Excellence at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University

“The characters and quirks that inhabit Nevergreen are all too familiar to professors at American universities. I was myself present at the 2015 Yale Conference on Free Speech that required police rescue from a mob of Instagram-drunk and logic-resistant Ivy League students. For an outlandish and scary visit to the asylum that is today’s campus, I heartily recommend this book.”
–Evan D. Morris, Yale University

“Kafka’s Joseph K. endured the absurdity of being accused of a nameless but all-consuming crime. But even he would have found the ideological prison of campus life in Andrew Pessin’s uproarious and prophetic novel, Nevergreen, to be Kafkaesque. Pessin delivers a devastating takedown of cancel culture, and does so with the wit and subtext of a Jewish novel about liberalism, where no actual Jews or liberals are to be found.”
— Thane Rosenbaum, Touro College, Author of the novels, How Sweet It Is!, The Stranger Within Sarah Stein, The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible 

“In a novel bristling with verbal wit, Andrew Pessin weaves a tale around the social justice warrior culture and where it might take the campus. This funny book is ideal for scholars to read as we begin withdrawing from our zoom boxes for the airport and for travel to in-person conferences.”
–Donna Robinson Divine, Smith College

“An enchanting, devastating satire of Woke U in the 21st century–all too familiar too us who have lived it.”
–David Bernstein, George Mason University

“Nevergreen is a satirical somersault into a postmodern campus dystopia where outrage is the only course that matters. The only thing distinguishing Nevergreen College from its real counterparts is the wit and irony which Pessin injects into every hilarious and horrifying page.” 
–Daniel Greenfield, Journalist

“Think a brilliant case of David Lodge meets 1984. You laugh until you realize just how close this is to reality. Pessin updates the academic novel to include cancel culture and virtue signaling. Strongly, strongly recommended.” 
–Peter Herman, San Diego State University

“A snapshot of our current campus crisis–a story achingly familiar to those, in the real world, who have faced the climate of growing hostility to ideological diversity on college campuses. With wit, humor, and precision, Pessin shows us just how chilling our own reality is, and forces us to face it directly.”
–Monica Osborne, The Jewish Journal, and author of The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma

“To say that Nevergreen made me uncomfortable would be an understatement, but that’s exactly what literature is supposed to do. Get us to think, get us to laugh, and at times, get us to feel unsafe. What happens in a world where perception reigns over facts and students are given control over education, politics, and ethics? What happens when a college makes everyone (and I mean everyone) feel unsafe? Nevergreen will have you asking yourself: Is this really satire or could this be our reality?” 
—Logan Levkoff, Ph.D., Author, TV Personality

“Nevergreen is really good, often hilarious but it is an uneasy humor; the happenings on the fictional bizarro Nevergreen campus are uncomfortably close to what is really happening today at many colleges. It is a world that Pessin knows well, where sanity is not a virtue and may in fact be a thoughtcrime.”
—Elder of Ziyon, blogger

“Witty and wonderful, timely and timeless, dealing with serious questions about life and work while engaging in some frenetic guerilla warfare. With intellectual prowess and emotional sensitivity, Nevergreen is a probing, delightful treat that is as meaningful as it is accessible. Not to be missed.”
–Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, Temple Beth Am

“Nevergreen is a timely story about campus cancel culture but also has a deep and real hidden story which every Jewish person in particular can connect to. With its satirical and critical angle, Andrew Pessin’s book is gripping and fascinating.”  
–Hen Mazzig, Senior Fellow, The Tel Aviv Institute

“Nevergreen is so unrealistically realistic for those studying in liberal arts colleges… campuses that have become so tolerantly intolerant.” 
–Ofir Dayan, Columbia University

“You’ll laugh at the antics of students and the monumental irresponsibility of the administration at Nevergreen College. But it’s really no laughing matter, as our once-liberal-arts colleges, our once-celebrated elite universities, are rapidly becoming Nevergreens, corrupted by ideology and imposing untruths and cancelling anyone daring to tell the truth. This frightening satire is more truth than fiction.”
–Philip Carl Salzman, McGill University 

“Nevergreen is a happily diabolical satire of a woker than woke campus that hyperbolically mirrors current academic reality. Pessin shoots barbs at the Right as well as the Left as he depicts a manic game of musical chairs among student groups jockeying for credibility by ‘hating hate.’ While we watch the whirligig of time bringing its revenges on the Virtue Patrols now auditioning for the role of Big Brother, we can divert ourselves with Pessin, a delightful and sardonic kibitzer.”
–David Mikics, University of Houston