Dear Committee Members: A Novel
by Julie Schumacher
Buy on Amazon"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel uses to tell that tale is a series of ... letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies"--Amazon.com.
Recommended by
"Among my favorite novels are David Lodge’s Small World, Richard Russo’s Straight Man and James Hynes’ The Lecturer’s Tale: all academic satires. I also greatly enjoy epistolary novels like Steve Kluger’s Last Days of Summer; Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, and 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (arguably, not a novel). And when I discover an epistolary academic satire — a collection of letters of recommendation from Jason Fitger, a literature and creative writing professor at a second-rate college — I feel as though I’ve hit the reading jackpot."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org