Book Fight

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.   

Direct download: Ep99-Knausgaard_ATimeForEverything.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

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

Direct download: Ep98-RoadTripPittsburgh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

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

Direct download: Ep97-Instagram_Essay.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

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.  

Direct download: Ep96-Carroll_ThroughTheWoods.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

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