Skip to content

Staff Pick of the Week: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

61

This week’s staff pick is a hysterical bite-s-zed novel, perfect for some beach reading.  Our staffer literally laughed out loud several times reading this. This is a fast read, all written via letters of recommendation that a beleaguered creative writing professor writes over the course of a year, and his story comes out through them (all fiction, all hilarious).  As they said: “Pick this up, you won’t regret it.”

Finally, a novel that puts the “pissed” back into “epistolary.”

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 department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. 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. His star (he thinks) student can’t catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville’s Bartleby.

In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious 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. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms.”– Taken from Goodreads.com

 

Don’t forget to follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Pinterest.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.