I love academic satire. Classics of the genre such as Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) have long been among my favorite novels. Two of the best recent additions to the genre are Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (2014), an epistolary novel told almost entirely through letters of recommendation, and her 2018 follow-up, The Shakespeare Requirement. Both novels center on the misadventures of Jason Fitger, a hapless English professor at the aptly named Payne University who finds his love for writing submerged in a sea of bureaucratic toil and personal disappointment. So, as I was recently walking through a local bookstore, I was delighted to discover that there is a third installment in Schumacher’s series—the 2024 novel The English Experience. The novel follows Fitger, now chair of the English department, as he is compelled to teach a January-term class in London for the university’s “Experience: Abroad” program. (Fitger takes as much issue with the gratuitous colon in the program’s title as he does with the idea of spending his break chaperoning unruly students in an unfamiliar city.) The story alternates between traditional third-person narration centering Professor Fitger and the daily essays that the students submit while on the trip. The students bond over the bad food, bad weather, and what they see as the unreasonable workload inflicted on them by the professor. It is perhaps embarrassingly obvious why Schumacher’s novel holds such appeal for me: as a middle-aged English professor, I see my life reflected in Fitger. The simplest and greatest delight of literature is identification—to find our sorrows and joys, our anxieties and passions, represented in the pages of a good book. A professor herself, Schumacher also has a talent for capturing the absurdity and sweetness of academic life.