Award-winning author Julie Schumacher will appear Wednesday, Feb. 3 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Leighton Hall 304 at Carleton College in support of her latest novel, “Dear Committee Members,” winner of the Thurber Prize in American Humor and called a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR and The Boston Globe. Refreshments will also be served.
“Dear Committee Members” (Doubleday, 2014) follows Jason Fitger, 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. His life, a tale of woe, is revealed in 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.
Newsweek called the book “A smart-as-hell, fun-as-heck novel composed entirely of recommendation letters. . . . Beyond the moribund state of academia, Schumacher touches on more universal themes about growing old and facing failure: not necessarily the dramatic failure of a batter striking out with two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth, but the quieter failure that accrues over time, until we are finally forced to admit that we are not who we wanted to become.”
Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University. Her first novel “The Body Is Water” (Soho Press, 1995) was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her other books include a short story collection “An Explanation for Chaos,” and five books for younger readers. She lives in St. Paul and is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.
Visit her on the web at julieschumacher.com.
This event is sponsored by the Carleton College Department of English. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4322. Leighton Hall is located at the end of College Street on the Carleton campus, and is also accessible via Highway 19 in Northfield.
