Book Fight

The results of our panel dare: Tom goes to a 75-minute session on therapy, while Mike explores the connections between history and poetry.

Hello, morning! We're a little groggy, but there's important conferencing to be done. Talking points: popping and locking, the guy in the newspaper hat, rejection notes.

More jibber jabber from the AWP conference in Boston. This time we're on the conference floor, recapping Day One in the belly of the beast.

We're at the annual AWP conference in Boston, i.e. ground zero of the American Writing-Industrial Complex. We'll be filing regular brief dispatches from the conference each day. Here's the first one! Talking points include: train travel, poets in newspaper hats, and rolling VIP style.

A novel-in-emails whose main character is annoyed to discover that a former friend has fictionalized his life in a book. Talking points include: Canadian rock, SARS, aggrieved exes, epistolary novels, and grilled cheese sandwiches.

On this Very Special Episode we field questions from students at Tom's high school alma mater. Changing lives!

An intensely dark, often comic novel about the British landed gentry and child abuse. Talking points include: the decision to write a memoir or a novel, mean-spiritedness versus generosity, inspirational dog films, and which one of us Frazier and which is Roz. Also, another installment of MATR, and whether Tom's recommendations are to be trusted.

Special bonus episode! Our gift to you, listeners. We read a Harlequin Romance novel about Viking love.

Low-residency MFA programs. Revisiting your old work. And should writers go to AWP? We also debate some new catch phrases, Mike alienates everybody, and we create a new iteration of MTV's Real World franchise.

A novel that prompts a discussion of how we pick books, and why certain books stress us out. Talking points include: story structure, penis length versus penis girth, athletes versus writers, Mexican vacations, and Mike's junior tennis career. We also debut a new feature at the end of the show, tentatively titled Mike and Tom Recommend, in which we ... well, recommend stuff (and bicker about said recommendations, as it turns out).