A podcast where writers talk honestly about books, writing, and the literary world

It's that time of year again: our annual holiday episode, where we invite several members of the Barrelhouse editorial team to read and discuss a very sexy holiday-themed novel. This year's book is SKRUJ: Holidate with an Alien, by bestselling author Honey Phillips. The book is a retelling, of a sort, of the Dickens Christmas classic, but starring a grumpy alien man with a weird (and gigantic) penis, and his human lover.

We wrap up our noir season with one final episode, this one discussing the 1963 Peter Sellers movie The Pink Panther, and the series more generally, which spoofed many of the tropes of the noir/detective genres. We also look back at the season--what we learned from diving into the noir genre, and our favorite books.

We welcome Nadira Goffe (culture writer for Slate) to talk about a Black, Southern noir from S.A. Cosby. We learn about Nadira's love of the Fast and the Furious franchise, her fear of actual driving, and her mixed feelings about an over-the-top metaphor. Plus: Mike gets pedantic about dialogue tags, and Tom realizes there's a limit to how many car-chase sequences he's willing to read in a novel. Vroom vroom!

We welcome back best-selling crime novelist Tod Goldberg to talk about one of his favorite books, by one of his favorite authors. Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel was the basis for the 2012 film of the same name, which netted Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar nomination at the age of 20. The movie is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, though the book's musical language and rich detail make it worth a read even for those who've seen the film. 

We're joined by novelist and high-school music teacher Daniel DiFranco (Panic Years, Devil on My Trail) to discuss the Margaret Millar novel Do Evil in Return, a staple of the noir genre. We talk about the line between serious and campy, how to move plot forward in a novel, and the difficulty of endings. 

We welcome Joanna Pearson (author, most recently, of Bright and Tender Dark), who makes the case that we should put Mary Gaitskill's short stories in the "noir" category--or at least mark them as noir-adjacent. We discuss two specific Gaitskill stories, "The Other Place" and "The Girl on the Plane," as well as the particular darkness of the Gaitskill universe.

We're joined by Steph Cha (author of Your House Will Pay) to talk about a famous California hardboiled novel none of us had ever read. What will it took us about tramps, insurance fraud, and the relative difficulty of staging a fake car-related murder? And what's the deal with that postman, with his infernal ringing? 

We're joined by comedian and writer Charlie Demers to discuss a novel that the famous crime writer Donald Westlake finished in the early '80s but which wasn't published until after his death. At the time, he apparently worried that the plot--about a famous comedian kidnapped by a Weather Underground-style group of revolutionaries--was too similar to the Martin Scoresese movie The King of Comedy.

he 1947 Dorothy Hughes novel In a Lonely Place is considered a hallmark of the noir genre, and also something of a feminist reimagining of those genre's tropes. We're joined by Isaac Butler (author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act) to talk about some of the book's narrative tricks, including an unreliable third-person narrator, and how it subverts the genre's "femme fatale" trope, among others. Plus: What made Dorothy Hughes think that 'Brub' was a good name for a character?

In the second half of the show, we learn about Isaac's relationship to Halloween costumes, which Muppet could play a hardboiled cop, and why Isaac thinks he's too old to read Slaughterhoue Five for the first time.

We're back! This episode kicks off a new season of the podcast, and this one's all about noir. In our first installment, guest Sarah Weinman (author of Scoundrel, and The Real Lolita) joins us to discuss a Patricia Highsmith novel, The Blunderer, about a rather hapless man who, despite not actually killing his wife, manages to convince nearly everyone that he has