The English Experience A Novel

The bestselling, Thurber Prize—winning author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement completes her hilarious trilogy of academic mishap by chronicling the beleaguered Professor Fitger as he leads the annual “Experience Abroad” to London and beyond with eleven clueless undergrads in tow.

Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he’s the only professor available to chaperone Payne University’s annual “Experience: Abroad” (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of Winter Term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believed he was headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before.

Through a sea of troubles--personal, institutional and international—the gimlet-eyed, acid-laced Fitger navigates safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes quite surprising places in which we find it.

JULIE SCHUMACHER grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University, where she earned her MFA. Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her 2014 novel, Dear Committee Members, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor; she is the first woman to have been so honored. 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.