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Dear Committee Members

10 best books like Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher): Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Mister Monkey, Changing Places, Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror, The Groves of Academe, Florence Gordon, Gone Tomorrow, Famous Writers I Have Known, The Mathematician's Shiva

Where'd You Go, Bernadette
AuthorMaria Semple
ISBN0316204277
Bernadette Fox has vanished.

When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox...
Mister Monkey
AuthorFrancine Prose
ISBN0062397850
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author weaves an ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off Broadway children’s musical.

Mister Monkey—a screwball...
Changing Places
AuthorDavid Lodge
ISBN0140170987
Changing Places is the first of David Lodge's "Campus" series, this one being set in 1969 and published in 1975. The sexual revolution, Vietnam, student sit-ins and smoking "pot" are all highly topical themes; the novel is pure "psychedelic '60's." The style is redolent of Lodge's dry, sardonic humour,...
Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere
AuthorLauren Leto
ISBN0062070142
Want to impress the hot stranger at the bar who asks for your take on Infinite Jest? Dying to shut up the blowhard in front of you who’s pontificating on Cormac McCarthy’s “recurring road narratives”? Having difficulty keeping Francine Prose and Annie Proulx straight?

For all those...
Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror
AuthorJames Hynes
ISBN0312186967
The 3 tales of terror are supposed to be ruthless & chilling with cliff hanger endings. The blurb says, The characters spout silly jargon, wrestle with their writing problems, preen their tender egos, and skewer their colleagues. Most are likeable: their vanity is so human, it's almost touching....
The Groves of Academe
AuthorMary McCarthy
ISBN0156027879
Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim...
Florence Gordon
AuthorBrian Morton
A wise and entertaining novel about a woman who has lived life on her own terms for seventy-five defiant and determined years, only to find herself suddenly thrust to the center of her family's various catastrophes.

A wise and entertaining novel about a woman who has lived life on her own terms...
Gone Tomorrow
AuthorP.F. Kluge
The fiction surprise of 2008 heralded by The New York Times as a sharply observed yet tender novel and a quirky, tart yet unexpectedly generous story finally in paperback

Kluge's brilliant novel tells of George Canaris, a writing professor who is on the verge of forced retirement at a small...
Famous Writers I Have Known
AuthorJames Magnuson
ISBN0393350819
In this brilliant mix of literary satire and crime caper, Frankie Abandonato, a small-time con man on the run, finds refuge by posing as V. S. Mohle—a famously reclusive writer—and teaching in a prestigious writing program somewhere in Texas. Streetwise and semiliterate, Frankie finds that...
The Mathematician's Shiva
AuthorStuart Rojstaczer
ISBN0143126318
A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is Illuminated

Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician...
Treasure Island!!!
AuthorSara Levine
ISBN1609450612
When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done...
Equilateral
AuthorKen Kalfus
ISBN1620400065
Equilateral is an intellectual comedy set just before the turn of the century in Egypt. A British astronomer, Thayer, high on Darwin and other progressive scientists of the age, has come to believe that beings more highly evolved than us are alive on Mars (he has evidence) and that there will be a perfect...
Burning Down George Orwell's House
AuthorAndrew Ervin
ISBN1616954949
A darkly comic debut novel about advertising, truth, single malt, Scottish hospitality—or lack thereof—and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 
Ray Welter, who was until recently a highflying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps...
Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text
AuthorRoy Blount Jr.
ISBN0374103704
Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists

No man of letters savors the ABC’s, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the...
The Search for Heinrich Schlögel
AuthorMartha Baillie
ISBN1935639900
Martha Baillie’s hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a two-week hike into the isolated interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions as shards of Arctic history emerge...
You & Me
AuthorPadgett Powell
The cult hit The Interrogative Mood—a Best Book of the Year selection by Amazon.com, GQ, The Believer, Time OutNew York, and elsewhere—reminded readers that Padgett Powell is one of the enduring stars of American fiction, an electric novelist with a pitch-perfect ear for the way Americans talk...
Lost for Words
AuthorEdward St. Aubyn
ISBN0374280290
The judges on the panel of the Elysian Prize for Literature must get through hundreds of submissions to find the best book of the year. Meanwhile, a host of writers are desperate for Elysian attention: the brilliant writer and serial heartbreaker Katherine Burns; the lovelorn debut novelist Sam Black;...
Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices And Small Salaries Of America's Teachers
AuthorDaniel Moulthrop
ISBN1565849558
Do teachers really have it easy?
"Teaching would be the greatest job in the world-if money didn't matter."
"I told the girl I was dating I wouldn't mind teaching and she said, 'Don't waste your talent on that.' "
"The schizophrenia is an issue: are you a professional or are you not?"
"I...
Best to Laugh
AuthorLorna Landvik
ISBN0816694532
No one steps up to life’s banquet, holds out her tray, and orders, “Grief, please!” But as a child, Candy Pekkala was served a heaping helping of it. Every buffet line has a dessert section, however, and when a cousin calls with a Hollywood apartment to sublet, it seems as though Candy is finally...
A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York
AuthorLiana Finck
ISBN0062291610
In an illustrative style that is a thrilling mash-up of Art Spiegelman's deft emotionality, Roz Chast's hilarious neuroses, and the magical spirit of Marc Chagall, A Bintel Brief is Liana Finck’s evocative, elegiac love letter to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New...
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
AuthorGreg Grandin
ISBN0805094539
From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America’s struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond.

One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal...
How I Became a Famous Novelist
AuthorSteve Hely
ISBN0802170609
What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and perhaps most...
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
AuthorJanice A. Radway
ISBN0807843490
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics,...
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