[The Page 69 Test: The Old Romantic; Writers Read: Louise Dean (March 2011); My Book, The Movie: The Old Romantic]
Dean has won The Betty Trask Prize and Le Prince Maurice Prize, been nominated for The Guardian First Book Prize, and longlisted for the
Dublin International Literary Award and The Booker Prize. Her books have been deemed the top books of their year by The Guardian, The Observer and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for the Costa Coffee 2020 Short Story Award.
In 2017 Dean founded of The Novelry. It provides courses and advice to writers of any moral condition, with or without novels in progress.
At the Guardian the author tagged ten top novels about novelists, including:
Dear Committee Members by Julie SchumacherRead about another entry on the list.
As creative writing professor at an undistinguished liberal arts college, Jason Fitger is frequently asked to pen letters of recommendation for his students and assorted colleagues. A year’s worth of such letters makes for an epistolary novel that gives a brilliantly comic insight into the politics, frustrations and occasional joys of academia, as well as a teasing study of a man on the ropes. His sign-off to the very first letter captures the tone of a novel that manages to be uplifting, despite the disappointments that its hero faces: “In sadness but looking to the future.”
Dear Committee Members is among Emily Temple's fifteen great campus novels published in the last decade, Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst's ten top modern epistolary novels, Maureen Corrigan's top 12 books of 2014, Kate DiCamillo's 3 favorite books of 2014, and Ellen Wehle's four top novels "in which teachers and students run just a little bit off the rails."
The Page 69 Test: Dear Committee Members.
--Marshal Zeringue
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