Episodes | Book Fight!

January 20, 2020
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Episode 310: Winter of Wayback, 1922!

Since we’re doing an entire season about the 1920s, at some point we had to read Zane Grey, one of the decade’s best-selling authors. His book The Vanishing American was first serialized in 1922, in Ladies Home Journal, and angered some people for deigning to suggest that the Indian Schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs might have been less than amazing. The book’s main character was loosely inspired by the experience of Jim Thorpe, who attended the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania before he became one of the world’s most celebrated athletes.

We also discuss Emily Post’s rules for etiquette, and “flapper cops.”

As always, you can stream the show right here on our site, or download the mp3 file to listen to later. Or check us out in Apple podcasts, where you can subscribe (for free!) and catch up on older episodes. We’re also available on Spotify, Stitcher, or just about any other podcast app. If for some reason you can’t find us in your favorite app, please reach out and let us know!

If you like the show and would like more Book Fight in your life, consider subscribing to our Patreon. For $5/month, you’ll get access to regular bonus episodes, including monthly episodes of Book Fight After Dark, where we read some of the world’s weirdest–and steamiest!–novels. We’ve also recently begun a new series of Patreon-only mini-episodes called Reading the Room, in which we offer advice on how to navigate awkward, writing-related social situations.

Thanks for listening!

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January 13, 2020
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Episode 309: Winter of Wayback, 1921!

This week, we’re continuing our exploration of the 1920s with Robert Keable’s Simon Called Peter, a mostly-forgotten novel about an Anglican priest who goes off to war and falls in love with a lady who isn’t his fiancee. He also has a crisis of faith, both because of the “having sex with someone who isn’t his fiancee” thing, and also the thing where the British troops don’t seem to take religion all that seriously. Apparently the book was quite scandalous in its time, getting banned in some places, showing up in a murder trial, and even meriting a dismissive mention in The Great Gatsby.

Will Keable’s book stand the test of time? Or will its moral conundrums seem kind of laughably quaint to a couple 21st-century readers? Also: we explore the practice of grafting skin from monkey testicles onto humans, which was apparently all the rage in the 1920s.

Thanks for listening!

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January 6, 2020
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Episode 308: Winter of Wayback, 1920!

We’re kicking off our Winter of Wayback season, in which we travel to the past and dig up some forgotten (or under-appreciated) books and stories, and use them to learn some things about the time period. This year we’ll be traveling through the 1920s, a decade neither of us knows all that much about, outside of the stereotypical images of flappers and speakeasies and Lost Generation writers smoking jazz cigarettes at Parisian cafes. For 1920 we’ve unearthed some old issues of Black Mask, a pulp magazine begun by H.L. Mencken as a way to fund his more literary magazine, The Smart Set.

We break down a few stories from the magazine’s early issues and talk about story-writing in an age before television. We also talk about our (limited) knowledge of the 20s, and what we hope to learn this season.

Thanks for listening!

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December 16, 2019
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Episode 307: Christmas 2019!

It’s that special time of year again, folks. When your beloved Book Fight hosts take a break from all the very serious literary talk and dive into a sometimes-cheesy, sometimes-infuriating, always-entertaining Christmas book. In past years we’ve read books by Debbie Macomber, Janet Evanovich, and even Glenn Beck. This year we’re checking out a book by the “queen of the beach read,” Elin Hilderbrand, who a few years ago branched out with a series of books set around the holidays.

For this episode, we read the first of Hilderbrand’s winter books, which introduced us to the Quinn family. Kelley Quinn owns an inn on Nantucket that he might have to sell. His second wife, Mitzi, has been carrying on an affair with the man who dresses up as Santa Claus at the inn’s annual holiday party. His oldest son, Patrick, might be headed to prison for insider trading. His daughter Ava is feeling lukewarm about her boyfriend, and his middle son Nathaniel is about to propose to a hot French lady. Oh, and his youngest son might be dead in Afghanistan.

We’ll be taking our usual end-of-year hiatus next week, BUT we’ll have a special bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers. We read a second, much more ridiculous holiday book, about knitting vampires, and we can’t wait to tell you all about it. To get that episode, and our other bonus content–including monthly episodes of Book Fight After Dark, and episodes in our advice series, Reading the Room–all you have to do is chip in $5 a month, which helps support the show and keeps our regular episodes free.

Thanks for listening!

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December 9, 2019
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Episode 306: Flash Fiction!

We’ve spent this fall season looking at some of the best stories to teach in creative writing workshops. It’s our last week, and we’re talking flash fiction. Definitions of flash vary, but generally speaking the term seems to apply to short stories of fewer than 1,000 words. We discuss our approaches toward teaching flash fiction generally, and then we dive into a few specific pieces: “What Happened to the Phillips?” by Tyrese Coleman; Jacob Guajardo’s “Good News Is Coming“; “When It’s Human and When It’s Dog” by Amy Hempel; and two short pieces by Joy Williams.

Thanks for listening!

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December 2, 2019
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Episode 305: Multiple Points of View

This fall, we’ve been talking about the best stories to teach in a creative writing class. For this week’s competition, we’re discussing stories that are told from multiple points of view. It can be difficult enough to successfully capture a single character’s consciousness on the page, which makes our first story pick especially impressive: “The Casual Car Pool,” by Katherine Bell, which originally appeared in the fall 2005 issue of Ploughshares. Our second pick takes a different tack to exploring multiple characters, keeping a distanced, fly-on-the-wall perspective: J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

We talk about the ways we approach point of view when teaching creative writing classes, particularly when it comes to the varieties of third person narration. We also talk about the difficulty of writing from multiple points of view in a single story, and whether it’s something we’d encourage or discourage our students from trying.

Also this week: one last trip into the NaNoWriMo forums!

Thanks for listening!

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November 25, 2019
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Episode 304: Dialogue

This fall, we’ve been talking about the best stories to teach in a creative writing class. For this week’s competition, we’re discussing dialogue, and pitting a story by Mary Miller against one by George Saunders. In Miller’s story, “Aunt Jemima’s Old-Fashioned Pancakes,” a teenage girl navigates friendship, romance, and weird dads. In Saunders’ “Pastoralia,” a man navigates a very strange job and a difficult coworker.