Book Fight

For today's episode we read this essay from The Toast, about the author's trip to Jerusalem, her religious parents, and the rift in her family following her sister's sexual assault. We've also got more from the NaNoWriMo forums, plus hot takes on Baby Hitler! For more, as always, you can visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week's book is both a detective story and an academic satire. We talk about the genre conventions of noir novels, and some of the more frustrating and ridiculous aspects of academia. In the second half the show we've got a new installment of Raccoon News that includes some historical raccoon news, plus more questions from the NaNoWriMo forums. For more, you can visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week we talk about a story by the crime writer Dennis Lehane (author of Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, and lots of other stuff). We also dip back into the NaNoWriMo forums to offer our advice on character names, bayou witch doctors, and whatever in the world a "Nano jar" is. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

Everyone's been talking about Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle. But we're reading the doorstop of a novel that won him acclaim in his home country before he turned his lens on his own life. A Time for Everything is part historical novel, part Biblical reinterpretation, part faux-theological study of the long evolution of angels. It's a book that's pretty tough to pin down. But we'll try! For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week we're hitting the road, recording while driving to the Barrelhouse-sponsored Conversations and Connections writers' conference in Pittsburgh. To make our conversation thematically appropriate we chose an essay by Paul Theroux called "Taking the Great American Roadtrip." We talk about what separates interesting travel writing from boring travel writing, our varying tastes for long drives, and why central Pennsylvania is both a beautiful and frightening place. You can read Mike's piece about driving cross-country here. We're not saying it's better than Paul Theroux, but maybe it's better than Paul Theroux? For more, as always, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

We discuss Jeff Sharlet's Instagram essay, created with the hashtag #Nightshift and later featured on Longreads (you can check it out here). We also talk more generally about the possibilities of using social media for storytelling. In the second half of the show we answer a listener question about cover letters and, in preparation for National Novel Writing Month, we visit the NaNoWriMo forums to see how we should be prepping for next month's fun. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week we've got a pair of guests, Kelly Phillips and Claire Folkman, editors of Dirty Diamonds: An All-Girl Comics Anthology, and recent winners of a Philly Geek Award. They've chosen Emily Carroll's Through the Woods for us to read, and they try to teach us how to approach comic stories. We talk about the relationship between text and image, ambiguous endings and spooky stories. In the second half of the show we talk to Claire and Kelly about their work with Dirty Diamonds, their own comics, crying at pop concerts and the enduring legacy of Weird Al. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week's reading is an essay about college binge drinking from a recent issue of Okey-Panky. We contemplate what an un-themed season of Book Fight might look like, plus Tom talks about his recent arguments with his publisher over the title of his book. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week's book was a donor pick, and man it sure was weird. Jelinek won the Nobel Prize just before this novel came out, though the award was not without controversy (one committee member actually resigned his post in protest). We try to make sense of the book's structure and prose, as well as its views on male sexuality. Then we talk about fan fiction for a while, since that's kind of our thing. For more, check us out online at bookfightpod.com.

Summer is coming to an end, and so is our Summer of Love feature. Join us for one final lap in the pool as we discuss this second-person story about how you're a real creep who should maybe stop treating women like objects. Also this week: hot takes on Kim Davis and the Duke freshman who won't read Fun Home because of boobies. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.