Dear Committee Members

National Bestseller
Winner, Thurber Prize
for American Humor
Winner, Midwest Booksellers
Choice Award
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
National Public Radio: one of “Best Books of 2014”
Boston Globe: one of “Best Books of 2014”
Chicago Tribune: “Laugh Out Loud Book of the Year”
Shelf Awareness, one of “Best Books of 2014”
Minnesota Monthly: one of five “Best Books of 2014”
Kansas City Star FYI City-Wide Book Club selection
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: one of ten “Best Books of 2014”
London Times Higher Education’s “Books of 2014”
Salon’s “What to Read” Awards: Top Critics Choose the Best Books of 2014
Edmonton Journal: one of five “Favorite Books of 2014”
Publishers Weekly “Book of the Week,” August 18, 2014
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.
“Let’s not look at this as an epistolary novel about the academic world, but as a laying out of the Tarot cards of our society’s past and future. It’s that indicative. That important. This is a funny, very sad, disarming novel. My pitch to Hollywood would be: David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” meets Padgett Powell’s “The Interrogative Mood” but – and here I’m just another expendable would-be savior, like Ms. Schumacher’s character Jay – nobody would know what I was talking about. My hat’s off to the author of this flawlessly written, highwire act of a book. Hollywood be damned.”
— Ann Beattie