Book Fight

This week: a good book for a change! Plus a new segment about impenetrable academic writing, and a brief installment of Fan Fiction Corner. What more could you want?

This week we've set the time machine for 1961, and we're reading a story by the author and activist Tillie Olsen. We talk about Olsen's career arc and continued reputation, as well as lots of other 1961 news: racist conspiracies, gigolos, and the J.D. Salinger backlash. Plus: what were poets up to in 1961? For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

Spoiler alert: this book kinda blows.

We're traveling back in time to 1877 to read a popular, serialized dime-store novel about lots of people shooting guns in the Old West. We talk about the popularity of dime-store novels, and how they correlated to rising literacy rates in the late 19th century. Plus: a story about coal miners being crushed under the boot of Gilded Age capitalism. And all our usual jibber jabber. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This novel combines elements of familiar fairy tales and mythic narratives to create a world that feels pretty original. It's a dark world, and a pretty sad one, yet the book also has a sense of humor, and a strong sense of play. We also talk about raccoons, since that's a thing we do, and we mark the return of a long lost segment that has to do with Tom's pants.

L.H. Sintetos had a story featured in the 1978 Best American Short Stories anthology and then seemed to disappear from the literary world. Which is especially surprising, given how good the story is. We talk about why we like "Telling the Bees," and we try to figure out what happened to its author. Plus, plenty of other 1978-themed stuff: political turmoil in Philadelphia, serial killers, a Pope conspiracy, an owl man, and GREASE! For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

Our book this week is about a young woman whose life was ripped apart by the Yugoslav Civil War, which took her parents and turned her, briefly, into a child soldier, before she made it to Philadelphia, where she tried her best to put her past in the past and move on with her life as an American. In the second half of the show, it's the triumphant return of Fan Fiction Corner. Ever wonder what kind of fan fiction people are writing about HGTV shows? No? Well, you're going to find out anyway!

This week we're traveling back to 1988 to read a story by Mary LaChapelle, who that year won a Whiting Award and had her debut story collection praised in a number of publications, including The New York Times. Since then, LaChapelle has published nothing that we could find. We talk about her story "Anna in a Small Town," about a mime and a giant, and cover some other crucial 1988 news, including a Philadelphia garbage barge that went on a world tour, and why ALF was a lot more fun to watch than to work on. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

We've talked about Jennifer Weiner on the show before, usually when she's written (or tweeted) something that's caused a stir in the literary world, or when she and Jonathan Franzen have gotten into one of their famously catty spats. We also read one of her stories back in the Spring of Success. But this is the first time we've dived into one of her novels. She's argued that her work is unfairly pigeonholed, and so we were curious to check it out for ourselves. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

Our first Winter of Wayback episode for 2017! We're time-traveling back to 1966, a year when the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, the Church of Satan was founded, and Philip K. Dick published the short story that would later be the basis for the movie Total Recall.