My novel, A Footnote to Plato, is available on Amazon!
Print and ebook formats also available from Wipf and Stock.
Please join the mailing list—that box to the right that says “Mailing List Subscribe”—for updates. (You won’t get a message telling you that you’ve signed up.)
If you’ve read it, I hope you’ll leave your feedback on Amazon or Goodreads (or the platform you prefer). Even a star rating and a quick description or phrase helps authors immensely. Reader reviews help books get discovered.
Many thanks!
Back Cover Copy
A Footnote to Plato takes place in 2012 at a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont.
Philosophy professor, Dr. Isaac Fischelson, finds himself embroiled in a student drama which leads to a false accusation of sexual harassment and an investigation intended to force him out. He faces a disgraceful end to his long career, unless he retires immediately. But Dr. Fischelson refuses to be, as his students like to say, an epic failure.
Zeb is a promising math student who has resorted to dealing coke to pay for college. He lives on a failed hippie commune with his toxic mother, who seems intent on bankrupting her son, both materially and spiritually. Zeb tries his best to escape her world, but what he really needs is a bit of luck.
The two meet in the Maintenance Committee, and soon form a Socrates-Plato bond. When Zeb offers to help the professor put together an online lecture series, Isaac decides to take him and a small group of students to Greece to film it. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for Zeb, and Isaac’s last chance to save his reputation—and maybe leave behind a legacy.
A FOOTNOTE TO PLATO is written in the tradition of Coetzee’s Disgrace, Roth’s A Human Stain, and David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy, with shades of The Chair and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus.
Dreaming of joining the Wall of Fame? Send me a selfie!
A Footnote to Plato Audiobook
Get it for free by requesting it from your local library, or purchase on Spotify.
Press Kit
You can request a review copy of A Footnote to Plato directly from the publisher. I also have redemption codes available to listen to my audiobook for free on Spotify. Just shoot me an email at [email protected]. Thanks!
Imprint: Resource Publications
Advance Praise for A Footnote to Plato
“A Footnote to Plato is precisely observed and amusing, playing the Platonic quest for virtue against the ethical regression of contemporary academia. Even without the Platonic material the novel is, in spirit, knowingly playful in a way that Plato would surely recognise.”
—Luke Slattery, Australian novelist and journalist, author of Reclaiming Epicurus
“Brilliantly confronts one of the great—and urgent—needs of culture: to reveal the often distant power of philosophy through the warm intimacy of a page-turning story. At last, Plato comes alive in the middle of modern America.”
—John Armstrong, British writer and philosopher, co-author of Art as Therapy with Alain de Botton
“An academic novel and a novel of ideas, served up cheerfully and heroically by a very talented writer who doesn’t care if both these genres are out of fashion. You shouldn’t either.”
—Ptolemy Tompkins, former editor of Guideposts magazine, author of The Modern Book of the Dead, collaborator with Eban Alexander on #1 NYT bestseller Proof of Heaven
“In this captivating novel, Tina Lee Forsee skewers academic politics, and takes us from Vermont to Greece and back, and makes Plato relevant (again) in reckoning with our purpose in life. The winning Alexandra, with her jumpy mind, the perseverating professor, brilliant but troubled Zeb, and a ghostly college president take us on a very lively trip into the cave.”
—Meg Files, author of Writing What You Know
