This week we're kicking off a new season of Book Fight: Summer School! The idea is that we'll dive into books, stories, and essays that we feel like we should have read by now. That could mean classics, but it could also mean contemporary work that's been sitting on our to-read pile for a long time, or that we've been avoiding for one reason or another.

For the first Summer School episode we've got a Mike pick: an essay from John D'Agata's book Halls of Fame. Mike's been meaning to get to some of D'Agata's work for years now, despite having mixed feelings about his relationship to the truth and "truthiness" (as explicated in the book The_Lifespan_of_a_Fact, which traced the back-and-forth between D'Agata and a fact-checker at the Believer who found a number of factual errors in his piece about suicides in Las Vegas).

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps us make a bit of money each month and keep the show going. For just $5 a month, you'll get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we visit some of the weirder, goofier corners of the literary world. Recently, that's involved reading a paranormal romance novel, the debut novel of Jersey Shore's Snookie, and the novelization of the movie Robocop.