Dear Committee Members

Have you ever been a teacher? If you have, you will roll on the floor with laughter reading this book.

The author, Julie Schumacher, has absolutely nailed what faculty life on campus, with all its stupidity, pettiness, and rivalries, is like. After I read it, all I wanted to do was get other people to read it. Amazingly, so many already had!

Finding other fans of the novel was a way to sort of relive the experience of reading it, with a lot of “How about the part where...” There is a wonderful curmudgeon in the book, my favorite sort… show more.

Never, in all my years of writing recommendation letters, have I considered them as a form of literature. In fact, recommendation letters strike me as anti-literature: documents of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and for the bureaucrats.

Yet here is a fabulous, funny, and rather touching epistolary novel written in the form of recommendation letters. 

Our antihero is a cantankerous English professor at a second-rate university, firing off witty missives at institutions and employers. He is a man of words who wants to shape the world through words alone, without leaving his desk—and his results are suitably disappointing to him… show more.

As a recovering college professor myself, I treasure this hilarious spoof of academia. Schumacher’s witty pasquinade on the professoriate will delight all readers, but it will be especially delicious for those of us who know from experience just how nasty politics becomes when the stakes are so low.

The novel consists of a series of academic letters of recommendations written by a frustrated, caustic, and yet somehow endearing English professor whose mordant sense of humor infuses every letter with irony and irreverence. Each letter is what many professors might have wanted to write (I know I did!) but didn’t because… show more.

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed out loud as much at any book, much less one about the academic life. Consisting of a series of recommendation letters (the bane of a professor’s existence!) written by a professor that somehow manages to capture every aspect of the professorial life in a brutal and hilarious way. The lead character will grab you by his personality and wit, his letters the perfect blend of curmudgeonly passive-aggression that really is appropriate when dealing with much of the crap (excuse the French!) that clogs up what ought to be the life of the mind. Mildly… show more.

Over the course of my career, I have written hundreds of letters of recommendation—graduate school admissions, faculty hiring, faculty promotions and tenure, election to the National Academy of Engineering—the works. Writing such letters is serious business. What hilarious relief this book provides! It is an exquisite parody of several dozen archetypal recommendation letters, demonstrating both with poignancy and humor the kind of damage that a less-than-woke writer can do. I loved it.

Intellectuals are dumb. Particularly when they are navigating their own insecurity and ambition. Told through a series of ill-advised and awkwardly personal letters to various scholastic and literary entities, this book shines a comic light on the world of petty, festering academic grievance.