Book Fight

We welcome guest Asali Solomon, author of the new novel Disgruntled, to talk about Marlon James's 2009 The Book of Night Women. James's novel is about a Jamaican sugar plantation around the turn of the 18th century, and the lives of its enslaved people, particularly Lilith, a young woman who is sent to work in the slavemaster's house after fending off a would-be rapist. Solomon talks about why the novel stands out among neo-slave narratives, and why she considers it "a bad-ass book." We also talk to Solomon about growing up in, and later returning to, West Philadelphia, and how her home city changed in her absence. For more, including links to a lot of what we discussed this week, visit us online at bookfightpod.com. Once again this week we're sponsored by 21st Century Prose, a new press housed at the University of Michigan that's already released four books, including Matthew Derby's Full Metal Jahcket, and Lauren Foss Goodman's A Heart Beating Hard. Use the code "bookfight" at checkout to get 30% off any order.

Our final installment in the Spring of Spite, and we've got a story that is spiteful in two ways. The story's narrator is almost certainly motivated by spite, and it would seem that Poe himself was drawing on some spiteful feelings when writing it. Also this week: Bobby Flay's spiteful divorce, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, and why aren't there better contemporary lit feuds? For more, including links to this week's story, and other things we talked about, visit us online at bookfightpod.com. Our sponsor this week is 21st Century Prose. Check out their site, where you can read all their books for free electronically, or order paperback/hardback copies to be delivered. They're doing some really exciting, genre-bursting stuff over there, so don't miss out!

Paul Beatty's latest book, The Sellout, has been getting great press, described as a game-changing satire on race in America. We talk about whether the novel lives up to that high praise, and debate how to categorize its humor. We also talk about the audience for satire, and whether satire can truly change a person's perspective. In the second half of the show we've got another installment of Fan Fiction Corner, in which Mike shares some sexy fanfic he found about President Obama's intimate life. This week's episode is sponsored by 21st Century Prose, a new book series featuring open-sourced books that challenge traditional genre lines. If you do choose to buy any of their books, in paperback or hardback, use the promo code 'bookfight' for a 30% discount. For more, as always, you can visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week's spiteful story is "A Poetics for Bullies," which Stanley Elkin has described as the best story he ever wrote. In it, Push the Bully comes up against his greatest challenge: a new kid beloved by his classmates and seemingly impervious to Push's efforts to take him down a peg. We've also got stories this week about Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, two grown men who did not particularly care for each other! For more, including links to some of the feud-related stuff we talked about on the show, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week's discussion centers on a genre-bending book by Maggie Nelson, an unconventional memoir and a treatise on perception, pain, love and loss, and the color blue. Bluets came out in 2009 and has become a real touchstone for some writers of both creative nonfiction and poetry. We also talk about Tom's recent trip to Italy, his hatred of Romans, and Mike's growing hatred of online user reviews. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week we're reading an essay by Harlan Ellison called "The Three Most Important Things in Life," which was suggested to us by a listener who said we couldn't talk about spite without talking about Ellison. We talk about whether we buy the essay's details, whether Ellison is self-aware as a narrator, and whether it's a good or bad idea to tell dirty jokes on your first day at a new job. We also discuss some of Ellison's own spiteful behavior, and his super-janky website. Plus: another author feud, this one between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, and a couple stories of companies that exist only because of spite. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

This week is another donor pick, Donald Antrim's first novel, which presents a kind of dystopic view of an American suburb, one where people build moats around their houses and a town mayor is drawn and quartered. We talk about the limits of irony, and whether this book, published in the mid-90s, should be considered prescient. We've also got another installment of Fan Fiction Corner, this one featuring a couple surprising pairings. For more, as always, you can visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

For this installment of the Spring of Spite we read a few selections from Bernhard's collection MY PRIZES, which includes essays about his experiences with prize ceremonies and some speeches he delivered at those ceremonies. There's plenty of Bernhardian spite to go around: for other writers, for his home country of Austria, for the idea of literary prizes in the first place. We've also got stories this week about some neighbors who took their spite to the next level, as well as another literary feud, this one between Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. For more, visit our website at bookfightpod.com.

This week we're reading (part of) this famous work of natural history from the early 19th century. Alexander von Humboldt traveled extensively in Latin America and recorded all sorts of stuff: geology, plant life, animal life, interactions with the natives, water temperatures, and speculation abou tcontinental drift. The book, a donor pick from our winter fundraising, is sort of a departure from our normal reading, but we're always happy to try new things outside our normal comfort zones. Also this week, another installment of Raccoon News, including a dispatch from our neighbors to the north, and a new segment: James Patterson Novel Or Eric Stoltz Movie From the 90s? For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.

Week two in our Spring of Spite, and we're reading a delightfully odd Flannery O'Connor story called "Enoch and the Gorilla," about a man who is very excited to insult a famous ape. Though things don't turn out how he planned! We also talk about spiteful wills and obituaries, spiteful paleontologists who basically made careers out of hating each other, and the long-running feud between H.G. Wells and Henry James. Note: This version of the episode fixes an audio issue around minute 46 in the previously published file. For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com.