Dear Committee Members
Jason Fitger • Book 1
by Julie Schumacher
Why You'll Love This
Every letter of recommendation Jason Fitger writes reveals a little more of his own spectacular unraveling — and it is deeply, uncomfortably funny.
- Great if you want: sharp academic satire with a surprisingly melancholy undercurrent
- The experience: quick and dry — reads in one sitting, lingers longer
- The writing: Schumacher weaponizes the formal letter format with pitch-perfect comic timing
- Skip if: you need plot momentum — this is character and tone, not story
About This Book
Jason Fitger is a creative writing professor at a quietly crumbling midwestern university, and he has opinions — about the administration gutting his department, about the economists upstairs getting gleaming new offices, about his stalled career and his complicated romantic history, and most urgently about the parade of students, colleagues, and strangers who need recommendation letters from him. What begins as sharp academic satire quietly becomes something more affecting: a portrait of a man watching his professional world shrink and his personal failures accumulate, one aggrieved letter at a time. The stakes are both absurdly small and, somehow, genuinely tender.
The entire novel is constructed from recommendation letters, and that formal constraint is where Schumacher's wit really cuts. Fitger cannot write a single letter without editorializing, lobbying, complaining, or settling old scores — and yet real longing and loyalty bleed through every overwritten paragraph. At 181 pages, the book is bracingly efficient, never overstaying its welcome. The epistolary format, so easy to execute badly, is handled here with real discipline and comic precision. Readers who love novels built from unconventional structures will find this one genuinely satisfying.