You may be asking yourself how this week's pick is a "holiday book," exactly. Fair question! But one which Mike explains, more or less, in the episode. It's also one of our only forays, thus far, into the horror genre, and we talk a little about what makes a horror book scary, plus what separates real psychological horror, as opposed to the sort of blood and gore that can almost read like slaptstick. Stephen King has said that this book is one of the best horror books of the late 20th century, w...
Dec 04, 2017•55 min
This week we're talking about this essay from Aeon , about spending your Thanksgiving in a cemetery with your family members (both living and dead). We talk about our expectations for essays, and whether the amorphousness of the term itself lumps together too many disparate kinds of pieces, with different kinds of aims. In the second half of the show, we're back on our bullshit, with a new installment of Fan Fiction Corner (featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and one last dip into the Na...
Nov 27, 2017•1 hr 3 min
We've decided to dive into some holiday-related stories, essays and books to close out the year. First up is " The Women of This World ," a short story by Ann Beattie that was first published in The New Yorker in November 2000. Mike read a lot of Ann Beattie stories when he was first taking creative-writing classes in college, and was interested in revisiting some of her work to see if he'd still connect with it in the same ways. We also dive back into the NaNoWriMo forums to see what kinds of q...
Nov 20, 2017•1 hr 5 min
This week we're discussing our final novel of the Fall of Frauds, a book about two "authentic" bluesmen who turn out to be not quite what they seem. The music is real enough, but they've adopted the kinds of personas they assume their (mostly white) audiences want: uneducated, boozy, physically ailing black men from the deep south who speak in homespun slang, when they deign to speak at all. Don't Start Me Talkin' is Tom Willams' second book, published in 2014 by Curbside Splendor. Also: It's No...
Nov 13, 2017•1 hr 2 min
This week's episode was recorded live at Temple University's Paley Library. We were joined by local writers Jason Rakulek and p.e. garcia for a discussion of literary community, balancing the work of writing with the need to make a living, and pieces of advice we would've given to our college-aged selves. The format for this episode is a bit different than usual, since we were trying to make the program as useful as possible for an audience of college creative-writing students. But we think ther...
Nov 06, 2017•58 min
This week we're back with another fraud-themed story, this one from an upstart indie author named Jorge Luis Borges. Probably you haven't heard about him. He's pretty obscure. Anyway, early in his career he wrote an entire collection of stories based on real-life criminals. The story we read, "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter," was also published (in English) in Harper's. This week we also talk about various Halloween-themed hoaxes, including razors in candy, and a BBC television production ...
Oct 30, 2017•1 hr
This week we're back with another fraud-themed novel, this one from best-selling Swiss author Martin Suter. His fourteenth novel, The Last Weynfeldt, is about art forgery, femme fatales, and what it's like to be wildly rich (spoiler alert: it's mostly pretty good, though sometimes it's kind of sad). Also this week, we talk about the ins and outs of art forgery, including the case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, considered to be one of the most prolific art forgers of all time. You can read more about Be...
Oct 23, 2017•58 min
This week we continue our Fall of Frauds season by discussing one of the most famous fraud-themed novels out there, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. If you haven't read the book, don't worry, we're not spoiling any late-in-the-book plot points. Also this week, we talk about how to fake your own death. Or, more accurately, how NOT to fake your own death, since the only examples one can find, of course, are of people who were eventually found out. Still: useful tips! Don't ever say we...
Oct 16, 2017•1 hr 1 min
This week we continue our Fall of Fraud theme by examining a story that is, like the Michael Martone story we discussed a couple weeks ago, something of a "fraudulent artifact." In "Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead," Carmen Machado tells a fictional story in the form of a Kickstarter campaign, even adding stretch goals and updates and user comments. As we talk about on the episode, the resulting story is much more than just a gimmicky experiment in form; Machado actually uses t...
Oct 09, 2017•1 hr 5 min
To be clear, right from the start, the point of this week's episode is not to call Robert Olen Butler a fraud. In fact we both quite enjoyed his story, "Mid-Autumn," from his 1992 collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. But it occurred to us that if this book were published today, it might get a few more sideways glances, since it's a white American author telling the first-person stories of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. So we thought it could be a good jumping-off point for a di...
Oct 02, 2017•1 hr 4 min
This week we continue our Fall of Frauds season with a book that's a kind of "fraudulent artifact." Michael Martone's book Michael Martone (published by FC2) is a series of stories in the form of contributor's notes. We talk about some ways that writers can use existing forms to experiment with both fiction and nonfiction, and what makes these stories interesting, rather than gimmicky.
Sep 25, 2017•1 hr 2 min
This week we're diving into our new fall season, in which we'll be reading stories, essays, and books with a "fraud" theme. That could mean stories in which characters are actually defrauding people, but it could also mean stories that are, themselves, frauds, as in fictional pieces masquerading as real-world documents. For this first episode, though, we've got a story that's the former, about a man who invents a charity at a party, while trying to impress a girl, and then has to see it through ...
Sep 18, 2017•1 hr 4 min
This is the last week for our Summer of Selfies, and we're turning our attention to a story about selfies. It's also fan fiction (depending on how one defines fan fiction), so it was probably inevitable we'd want to read it. Kevin Fanning, who was recently profiled in The Boston Globe , first made his name on Wattpad with a story called Kim Kardashian: Trapped In Her Own Game . The story we read this week, which is still being regularly updated by the author , also involves Kim Kardashian, this ...
Sep 11, 2017•1 hr 9 min
This week we continue our "summer of selfies" with a book we knew we'd have to read as soon as we conceived of the season's concept. Nearly everyone in the literary world seems to have an opinion about Knausgaard's six-book autobiographical series, whether they've read any of the books or not. While lots of critics (and other authors) have praised him as a genius, all that praise has led to an inevitable backlash, with plenty of people saying the books are over-long and tedious. So where will yo...
Sep 04, 2017•1 hr 7 min
This week we're continuing our discussion of literary "selfies" with this novel by Gaute Heivoll, which is about a string of arsons in 1970s Norway, though it's also about the writer who is haunted by those fires, even years later, enough to write a book about them. Though it's categorized as a novel, it seems clear the book's main character is closely aligned with Heivoll himself. In the second half of the show, we talk about the phenomenon of the Mary Sue in fan fiction, and in the larger worl...
Aug 28, 2017•1 hr 3 min
This week we continue our discussion of literary "selfies" with a piece by Jennifer Lunden that appeared recently in Diagram, called "Evidence, in Track Changes". The piece includes an essay written by Lunden, plus margin notes added by her mother and Lunden herself. We talk about what makes an experiment like this feel organic, rather than gimmicky, and what sorts of writing lessons that line might offer. Also, plenty of our usual foolishness, including some discussion of trends that (like self...
Aug 21, 2017•1 hr 1 min
This week we're discussing a recently published story from The New Yorker by Curtis Sittenfeld, author of a number of books, including Prep and An American Wife. In "Show Don't Tell," Sittenfeld turns her attentions to a fictionalized version of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the anxious first-year students who are awaiting decisions on their funding for the next year. Since both of your Book Fight hosts are Workshop grads, we take a little stroll down memory lane and compare our own experiences...
Aug 14, 2017•1 hr
This week we're continuing our Summer of Selfies theme by discussing confessional essays, including one by Tom Chiarella, a long-time writer and editor for Esquire. In an essay called "My Education," he detailed the sexual abuse he experienced at the hand of a Catholic-school teacher, while also wrestling with his own ambivalence about the benefits of writing such an essay. Americans, Chiarella says, feel the need to talk about their traumas, but is that always necessary, or even desirable?...
Aug 07, 2017•58 min
This week, as part of our "Summer of Selfies," we discuss the latest book from Pam Houston, a work of fiction that borrows heavily from the author's life and even names its protagonist Pam. We talk about the line between fiction and memoir, and some of the more interesting ways to blur that line. We also discuss some of the difficulties of autobiographical writing, like how to know when your own experiences will be interesting to others. In the second half of the show, we talk about James Frey, ...
Jul 31, 2017•53 min•Ep. 188
This week we're discussing Hunter S. Thompson's famous essay on the Kentucky Derby, which many people credit as the starting point for his gonzo style of journalism. Neither of us had read the piece before, and we realized that a lot of our impressions of Thompson were based on his legend, more so than on the work itself. Also this week: raccoon selfies, tourists who pay to take pictures with docile (and likely mistreated) tigers and elephants, and why there are so many car selfies on dating sit...
Jul 24, 2017•56 min
We're kicking off a new season for Book Fight, with a slight change in programming. This week marks the first episode of the Summer of Selfies, in which we'll be discussing some of the best--and worst--autobiographical writing. Up first: an essay for The New Yorker by Jia Tolentino, in which she argues that the heyday of a particular kind of personal essay is over.
Jul 17, 2017•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of our first Book Fight After Dark episode. The full version is available to monthly subscribers, via our Patreon page . For $5 a month, you'll get monthly bonus episodes like this one, plus the satisfaction of supporting a podcast you love (or at least like?). If you've already subscribed, there's no need to listen to this brief preview--just go enjoy the full episode over on Patreon. And we'll be back on Monday with another regular (free) episode. Thanks for listening! A...
Jul 13, 2017•8 min
This week we seek to settle an age-old debate: do you read the foreward first, or wait until you've read the book? Also: Nazis, animal cruelty, impotence, and classic Czech literature. Thanks for listening!
Jul 10, 2017•58 min
We talk about the latest graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Also we talk about Garfield fan fiction. You're welcome.
Jul 03, 2017•53 min
It's the last week of our spring season, in which we've been discussing stories about different kinds of flings. For this final installment, we're discussing the Lydia Davis story "Break It Down," about a man who's attempting to calculate the literal cost of a short-lived affair. Though his accounting is really just a different way to explore the ways a relationship can leave lasting marks. Also this week: Writers who had successful romantic relationships. The benefits and drawbacks to dating a ...
Jun 26, 2017•59 min
This week we welcome back fan favorites Kelly Phillips and Claire Folkman, the duo behind Dirty Diamonds, an all-girl comic anthology. They're currently working on their 8th book, Sex . They picked our book this week, a comic by Carolyn Nowak (Girl Town, Radishes) about a woman who orders a robot companion and then tells him her secrets. We talk about Diana's Electric Tongue, comic inspiration, running a small-press publishing company, working with your friends, Weird Al, the line between sex-th...
Jun 19, 2017•1 hr 9 min
This week we're talking about a new essay by Samuel Delany, self-described sex radical. "Ash Wednesday," from the Boston Review, is about a weekend trip the author takes to participate in a seniors' group-sex weekend. Also this week: The sex lives of authors, and should the reading habits of your potential romantic partners matter?
Jun 12, 2017•1 hr 14 min
This week's book is a brand new novel by Marcy Dermansky, about a woman who heads to San Francisco for the funeral of her former boss and, once there, begins to realize she might want to change her life. We talk about the book's deadpan humor, its unique voice, and whether we're cool or not cool with ghost cars in literature. In the second half of the show, Mike is bummed out by Twitter, and also by dummies. Thanks for listening!
Jun 05, 2017•51 min
This week we continue our "spring fling" theme by discussing one of the most famous stories about affairs: Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog." We also talk about Robert Lowell's romantic life, and the time he took his ex's letters and straight-up appropriated them for his poems. In the second half of the show, we do a deep dive into Yahoo Answers to see what kinds of affair-related questions people have (spoiler alert: people are the worst).
May 29, 2017•58 min
We welcome special guest Ande Carrington (author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction) to discuss a novel by Kiese Laymon, Long Division. We also talk to Andre about his work, race in science fiction, academic vs. non-academic writing, and lots more.
May 22, 2017•1 hr 14 min
