Book Fight

Hello, Book Fighters! It's a new season, and that means it's time for a new seasonal theme: Spring Forward! For the next several week, we'll be reading future-looking stories, books, and essays, and talking about literary visions of the future throughout various times in history. First up, we've got two stories from a new anthology, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, A People's Future...

This week we welcome two special guests: Christina Rosso-Schneider and Alexander Schneider, the husband and wife team behind A Novel Idea, a new bookstore in South Philly's East Passyunk neighborhood. When we have guests, we let them pick the book we'll read and discuss, and Christina and Alex picked R.O. Kwon's 2018 debut novel The Incendiaries. We'd all heard lots of buzz about the book, but wou...

Our special 90s season has come to an end, but we're capping it off by reading a book that has been described as "the ultimate 90s project" despite actually being published in the early 2000s. Chuck Klosterman made his reputation by taking silly pop culture seriously, a mission not too far removed from a certain literary magazine your humble hosts have some involvement with. One of us (Mike) read...

Last week we wrapped up our year-by-year journey through the 90s, but that doesn't mean it's time to stop talking about the decade. This week we're diving back in to look at some early online lit mags, including elimae, Eclectica, Blue Moon Review, and Nerve. We dive into the history of each publication, sample some work from the archives, and talk about how they fit into the larger literary ecosy...

This week we're doing something a little different for our 1990s-themed Wayback episode. Instead of reading a single book, story, or essay, we're diving into two issues of Story Magazine from the end of the decade--just before the venerable literary magazine folded for a second time, coincidentally.  Story recently came back from the dead once again, and has a new issue out this month . In additio...

For this week's episode we're talking about Meghan Daum's 1998 essay, " On the Fringes of the Physical World ," which details her mostly-online relationship with a man who reached out to her with a fan email.  We also talk about the promise (and disappointment?) of hypertext fiction, the beginnings of fantasy football, and the movie You've Got Mail .  

This week we're revisiting Ghost World, the 1997 graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. The book pulled together material from the serialized comic Clowes wrote over several years and published in his 20th Century Eightball series of anthologies. Later it was made into a movie starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansen, and Steve Buscemi. Also this week: what people were saying in 1997 about a little compan...

We're on to 1996, friends! For this episode we read a David Shields book, Remote, which is kind of a memoir, kind of a collection of creative nonfiction experiments, and kind of difficult to categorize. Mike bought it years ago, in college, before he knew anything about David Shields, and back then he found it a little confusing. Now, with more context for Shields' work, will it make more sense? T...

We're halfway through the 90s, and this week we're reading a book that feels very much like a time capsule of the era: Douglas Coupland's Microserfs , his follow-up to Generation X , the novel that introduced that term into the world. In Microserfs we follow a group of twenty-something coders as they quit their jobs at Microsoft to work for a start-up company in Silicon Valley. The book explores t...

Boy, the '90s are just flying by! We're already up to 1994, a year marked by tragedy (Kurt Cobain, Nicole Brown Simpson) and triumph (Mike's high school graduation). Our reading this week is a short story by Rick Moody, "The Grid." We talk about the story's unconventional structure, its musical voice, and its Gen X-era references. Mike also admits to having read this story aloud to multiple girlfr...

This week we time-travel back to 1993 to see what was going on in literature, technology, and pop culture. For our reading, we're diving into the John Edgar Wideman short story, "Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies," part of his prize-winning collection All Stories Are True . The story was inspired by a 1991 news report about a baby who had been discarded down the trash chute of an apartment building...

This week we're time-traveling back to 1992, and the first issue of The Oxford American , which in its early years was frequently referred to as "The New Yorker of the South." We read an essay by Larry Brown called "Fire Notes," which would later be published as part of Brown's memoir, On Fire . Brown was a firefighter and a self-taught writer who began banging out fiction on a typewriter during d...

This week, as we continue our adventure through the 90s, we're discussing both the winner and runner-up stories from 1991's Nelson Algren Prize , sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. Tom Barbash won for his story, " Howling at the Moon ," and Patricia Stevens came in second for her story, " Leaving Fort Ord ." Barbash would go on to publish a few books, while Stevens seems to have mostly left fiction...

Welcome to another Winter of Wayback season, Book Fight friends! After last year's run through the 1950s, this year we're skipping ahead to take on the 90s. Over the next ten weeks, we're going to dig into some of the best, most interesting, and weirdest writing published over the course of the decade, while looking at ways publishing changed over those years--the rise and fall of print magazines;...

Hello, Book Fighters! This is the second episode of Mike's new podcast Day Jobs, where he talks to writers, artists and other creative people about how they make a living. In this episode Mike's talking to Bud Smith, a writer and artist who works a full-time heavy construction job. They talk about writing on your phone, why no job is "brainless," and why Bud's girlfriend broke up with him after he...

We made it, everyone! To the end of another year (of Book Fight, that is). As per usual, we're closing out the year by reading a ridiculous Christmas-themed book. Actually, this year's selection is really four books in one, a collection of novellas that all involve magical cats, in one way or another. The book is called The Magical Christmas Cat , and it is ... pretty different from what that cove...

This week, having wrapped up our Fall of Finales but not quite ready for our annual Holiday Spectacular, we decided that we'd each pick a short piece we read recently and loved. Which led us to two essays: Andrea Kleine's " Once Upon a Time in New York: A Sublet of One's Own ," from Lit Hub, and Jamila Osman's " A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home ," from Catapult. We t...

This week we're diving into the work of the late A.A. Gill, a famous British journalist and essayist who died of cancer at the tail end of 2016. His final book, Lines in the Sand, collects a bunch of his journalism, including the pieces he wrote about European refugee camps. Gill started his writing career after sobering up in his early 30s, and was once Great Britain's highest-paid columnist. He...

This week we're talking about Denis Johnson's final book, the short story collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden . Prior to reading this one, we'd both been fans of Johnson's work, and had even met him once, in grad school. We talk about how his final stories compare to the ones that sparked his career as a fiction writer, in particular how the narrators in these pieces feel almost like more ma...

Neither of us had ever read the work of Helen Dunmore, but the more we looked into her career, the more we felt like we should have. For this week's episode we discussed the story "Girl, Balancing," which was the title story of her final story collection, published posthumously. The story starts slow, but takes a sudden turn into menacing territory. In the second half of the show, we talk about th...

William Trevor died in 2016, at the age of 98. Two years later, his final book of short stories appeared--titled, appropriately enough, Last-Stories. For this week's episode, we read one of those stories, "Mrs. Crasthorpe," which Julian Barnes, in a review for The Guardian, singled out as one of the book's best. We talk about the story, and about Trevor's stories more generally. He was always a wr...

This week we're back into our Fall of Finales season, in which we consider the final published work of notable authors. Philip Roth published the novel Nemesis 2010, about two years before he announced that it would be his last published book. In interviews at the time, he said he'd turned his attentions to helping his biographer understand his various papers, and that he was also re-reading his o...

We're taking a little break from our Fall of Finales season this week to chat with special guest Evan Madden, drummer with many hardcore and metal bands over the years, most recently Drones for Queens . It's always fun when we can get a non-writer onto the show to talk about their relationship to books and reading. Evan's book pick for the episode was Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,...

This week we continue our Fall of Finales season, in which we read and discuss the last published work of various authors. The Strand Magazine recently published a previously unpublished Ernest Hemingway story, written in the last decade of his life. It's called "A Room on the Garden Side," and is a semi-autobiographical piece about his time as an irregular soldier in WWII in Paris. In the second...

This week we welcome Emma Eiesenberg to the show. Emma is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the co-founder of Blue Stoop Philly, an organization which is pulling together all kinds of literary events and classes across Philadelphia. As is always the case when we have a guest, we let Emma pick our book this week. Her choice was A Grace Paley Reader , which came out in 2017 and collects...