On this episode we discuss Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and New Waves by Kevin Nguyen. This pair of seemingly disparate titles—one about a performing arts high school, the other about a tech startup—seem like they have little in common, but beyond having striking covers, they both explore what it means for the reader to be able to trust a narrator in contemporary reading. We also talk about our online lives and how they differ from our in person lives.

On this episode, Carmanita officially joins Booklovers as a cohost! To celebrate, we discuss two short story collections by award-winning master speculative fiction authors N.K. Jemisin and Ted Chiang. We open with an attempt at defining speculative fiction and then shift to discuss both collections in a general way before finding threads of commonality and contrast across pairs of stories. We close with a discussion of some of our favorite stories from both collections. Come for the dialogue and comity, stay for the publishing awards hot takes and a hilarious anecdote about Tamagotchi.

In this episode, Jess & Joseph tackle The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 novel about humanity and survival in North Korea. As with many stories about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son is grim, violent, and disturbing, but as with many works of fiction, it is also funny, hopeful, and sprinkled with small scenes of joy. We consider the role of a novel like The Orphan Master’s Son as a guide to the harsh realities of life in North Korea, and how fiction can offer readers broader educational scope for serious topics than reading only nonfiction for education.

On this episode, Jess and Joseph are joined by Carmanita Turner, the media selector for Spartanburg County Public Libraries, to discuss two recent titles that focus on Black life in urban settings: Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington, which takes place in Houston, and Sports Is Hell by Ben Passmore, which takes place in Philadelphia.

To cap off Pride Month virtual programming at SCPL, Jess and Joseph review seven recent LGBTQ+ graphic novels, which range from romance and noir to urban fantasy and philosophical nonfiction. Along the way, we talk about the varying styles of the different titles and suggested similar books for interested readers. Time travel, necromancy, smartphone apps that grow mushrooms from your phone, and graduate school are also discussed and general hilarity ensues.