This week we're talking about the story "Strawberry Lipstick" from Kseniya Melnik's debut collection, Snow in May, published this spring by Macmillan. We're also, in keeping with our Fall of Failure theme, talking about failed dog breeds, including the "turnspit," a dog people used to put in the oven, because humans are garbage monsters. Talking points include: long stories, post-Stalin Russia, class warfare, eugenics, and why The Melting Pot is a ripoff. Find more at our website, bookfightpod.com. 

This week we're reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. We talk about stream-of-consciousness narration, and whether the book should be considered a comedy. Also lots of other stuff. For more, including links to our weekly recommendations, check out our website at bookfightpod.com.

Our first-ever live episode, recorded at The Spiral Bookcase in Manayunk, just outside Center City Philadelphia and a few blocks from Tom's ancestral home. We're joined by Ann Tetreault (owner of the bookstore in question), Joey Sweeney (writer, musician, founder of Philebrity.com), Katherine Hill (fan favorite, author of The Violet Hour) and Lee Klein (author of Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, and The Shimmering Go-Between). 

We talk publishing, book-selling, offensive mascots, Philadelphia's culture of protest, Kickstarter annoyances, street fights, rejection, and rebounding from failure. Plus there's live music, audience interaction, and a cat (spoiler: you can't hear the cat).

For more, visit us online at bookfightpod.com. 

This week we're talking about an excerpt from Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home. We discuss the ethical issues raised by writing about one's family, and what makes a memoir compelling. We're also talking about the VCR format wars of the late '70s and early '80s. What can we learn from the failure of Betamax?

We talk about the younger Dubus's 2011 memoir of growing up in a series of rough neighborhoods, learning to fight, and making his peace with a mostly absent father. Also: raccoon news!

This week we're kicking off our new fall series, in which we read short stories and essays and also talk about various kinds of failure. In today's episode we're talking about J.D. Daniels' essay "Letter from Majorca," from the Paris Review. We also consider why failure is more interesting than success, and why Americans have such a difficult time with it.

This 1964 novel is one of the best-known by Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. The book follows Bird, a new father deciding whether to save his newborn son, whose seemingly severe birth defect might keep him from ever living a full life. 

The summer is over, and so is our Summer of Shorts. In this final installment, we talk about Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are The Only People Here" and--for those who've fallen in love with the shorts lifestyle--jobs for which you don't need to wear pants (or dresses/skirts). 

This week's book is a Mike pick: an essay collection about travel, displacement, love, loss and occasional psychedelic drugs. We talk about the necessary artifice of narration, and why readers so often fail to acknowledge it; how travel experience is often more about the traveler than the place itself; dark humor and bad habits. We also bring back our Sticks and Stones segment, make an important announcement, and get lost in a Groundhog Day-style feedback loop.

This week on Summer of Shorts we're talking about Donald Barthelme's "Me and Miss Mandible" and also swim trunks. Tom is headed out on a beach vacation, despite pretty much hating the beach, whereas Mike grew up near the beach and thinks he needs to get over his irrational fears of the ocean. Also, the story is pretty good, and you should check it out, either in the collection Come Back, Dr. Caligari, or in the collected Sixty Stories.