Dear Committee Members

Description

Jason Fitger, a weary professor of creative writing and literature at a small Midwestern liberal-arts college, spends much of his life composing letters of recommendation. The requests arrive for students, colleagues, jobs, grants, and other opportunities, but Fitger rarely confines himself to the candidate’s virtues. He digresses into complaints, old grievances, literary judgments, and thinly disguised messages to people who know his failures too well. As the letters accumulate, they reveal a stalled author who has exploited his relationships for fiction and damaged the romantic life he still mourns. Told entirely through this institutional correspondence, the novel turns professional obligation into comic self-portrait, exposing academic precarity, wounded vanity, and the human consequences hidden inside formulaic praise.

Themes