Book Fight

Terrible cover letters, faint praise, and what it's like to get beaten by a sack full of doorknobs. It's our third installment of Writers Ask, where we solve all your problems, writing and otherwise. Get into it! If you want to ask a question, hit us up on Twitter @Book_Fight.

We welcome back our first repeat guest, fan favorite Katherine Hill, to discuss this "novel from life." Opinions are strong on this one. Talking points include: source material for novels, the need for writers to have non-writer friends, and Tom's weird love for the TV show Frasier. Plus the debut of our new and improved intro music!

In the second installment of Writers Ask, Tom and Mike tell you how to recommend books to your non-literary friends, and how to deal with relatives who think they know what you should write about. Special bonus: Lightning round!

Sometimes the angriest books are also the funniest. Join us for a discussion of race and comedy, tokenism, Bill Cosby, and Donovan McNabb. Also: Tom is forced to revise his previous all-out ban on puns.

Tom hates metafiction. Mike tries to get him to love it, or at least appreciate it, using John Barth's 1996 collection On With the Story, linked stories that play a number of narrative games and call attention to how stories work, and how we expect them to work. We also talk about about the false dichotomy of sad stories vs happy stories, and why Tom's students want him to cheer the hell up.

SGJ blurs the lines between novel and memoir in his ninth book, an investigation of a mysterious cotton fire in his hometown of Greenwood, Texas, which left several lives permanently damaged in its wake. Topics discussed include: fact vs. fiction, tornado preparedness, the bleak landscape of West Texas, and Superhero Dave Eggers' ability to take flight fueled only by the power of whimsy.

Road trip! We head to State College to talk with writer and editor Dave Housley about a book he recommended to us: Laura van den Berg's debut story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books 2009). Topics include: book blurbs, dialogue, "lit fiction" as genre, George Saunders, monsters, Dockers vs dockers, Kristen Schaal, Heidi Montag, and ear fetishes. For more, visit our website at bookfightpod.com, or follow us on Twitter @Book_Fight.

Join your Book Fight hosts as they seek out a possible Messiah in the badlands of North Dakota. Will they choose to follow him into the wilderness? Will they rebuke him? Only one way to find out...

Stephen King's 4000-page Dark Tower series begins with a sentence that came to him as a 19-year-old: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." We're reading (rereading, in Mike's case) the first book in the series, The Gungslinger. Revised significantly by King two decades after its publication, hailed by his fans as the opening salvo of a magnum opus, the book has been as widely read as any King ever wrote. But will it weather the harsh desert-sun glare of the Book Fighters' critical eyes? Or will it wither under the strains of this terrible, terrible metaphor? For more info: bookfightpod.com. Do it!