Library Pizza

This is the nineteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

This week's guest is Tobias Carroll, a novelist, critic, newsletter author, podcaster, blogger, and columnist at Words Without Borders, where he writes "The Watch List," a monthly roundup of books in translation. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and may read more than just about anyone else I know. You can learn more about his work at tobiascarroll.com.

Texts and writers discussed include but are not limited to: The Dragon Waiting and The Last Hot Time by John M. Ford (and Isaac Butler's Slate piece on Ford's rediscovery); Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time; Peter David; Stephen King's Dark Tower series; Caroline Bicks's forthcoming Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King; J.R.R. Tolkien; Annie Proulx's The Shipping News; Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road); Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Killing Mister Watson; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; Tom Robbins; Ishmael Reed; Gayl Jones's Corregidora; Toni Morrison; John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire; Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun; Jack Kerouac; Raymond Carver; Iain M. Banks; Patrick Rothfuss; Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (and the Yorgos Lanthimos adaptation); Sigrid Nunez's The Friend; John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman; Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon and Deathwatch (adapted from D.G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eye); Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (and Charlie Kaufman's adaptation); Zach Cregger's Barbarian and Weapons; Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink; Haley Z. Boston's Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen; Steve Erickson; Locus; Robert Christgau; Tricia Romano's The Freaks Came Out to Write; Colson Whitehead; Namwali Serpell; Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America; Joan Didion; the National Review; the Know Your Enemy podcast; Robert A. Heinlein; Elizabeth Sandifer; the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies affair; Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone; Brian Eno on art as nourishment; BBC audio dramatist Julian Simpson; Adam Voith's TNI Books and Little Engines; and Todd Dills and The Second Hand.

Follow me on Bluesky here, and Tobias here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the eighteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis. This week's guest is Liberal Currents founder and editor Adam Gurri.

Follow me on Bluesky here, and Adam here.

Texts discussed in this episode include but are not limited to:

• Mother of Learning by nobody103
• Return of the Mad Demon by JP, Ihy, and based on a work by Yu Jin sung
• Elder Cultivator by Halosty
• How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
• The work of John Rawls generally
• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
• The works of John Locke generally
• The works of Hans Georg Gottheimer generally
• A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective by Steven L. Taylor, Matthew Søberg Shugart, Bernard Grofman, and Arend Lijphart
• Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom by Jacob T. Levy

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the sixteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis. This week's guest is my partner Tracy Rae Bowling, our AWP conference correspondent.

The main books we discuss are C. Thi Nguyen's The Score and Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

Follow me on Bluesky here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the sixteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis. This week's guest is Samantha Hancox-Li, an associate editor at Liberal Currents and the author of a book titled Feminism Is Transhumanism Is Modernity. You can support her on patreon here.

Follow me on Bluesky here, and Samantha here.

I'll add a list of readings to these show notes later; I reinvented my entire podcast workflow while editing this episode and some stuff hasn't quite come together yet.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the fifteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

This episode quotes at some length from Becca Rothfeld's February 10 New Yorker article "The Death of Book World". It also features a reading of an excerpt from The New Life.

Follow me on Bluesky here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the fourteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

Tracy Rae Bowling and I discuss our local-arts-cinema-hosted Twin Peaks full-series marathon, what we've been reading, getting big into the baked potato, and the work of several movie directors. We also invent a lucrative new concept, the Boyby-Sitters Club.

Texts discussed include:

1. C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series
2. Magda Szabó's novel Iza's Ballad
3. Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse
4. The Baby-Sitters Club
5. Michael Berry's Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke
6. Histories of China by Frank Dikötter
7. The works of Jia Zhangke and Satoshi Kon generally

We'll see you again soon.

Follow Mike on Bluesky here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy for creating the podcast's theme music, and to my friend Blorb for the podcast's art.

This is the thirteenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis. This week's guest is Adam Elkus.

• The Other Side by Alfred Kubin
• Franz Kafka generally
• H. P. Lovecraft generally
• The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria
• The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger
• The Ring novels by Koji Suzuki
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (and other Hammett works)
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• Sherlock Holmes generally
• Ghost in the Shell, directed by Mamoru Oshii
• Kobo Abe generally
• Truth from a Lie by Margaret S. Key
• There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
• The SCP Foundation
• "Sovereignty and the UFO" by Alexadner Wendt
• Philip K. Dick generally
• Undead Girl Murder Farce (anime)
• Paranoia Agent, directed by Satoshi Kon
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
• The Twenty Days of Turin, again
• Writing by Venkatesh Rao
• The train game Mike mentions is called Rolling Line
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Clair Obscure: Expedition 33
• "Successor, Usurper, Replacement" by Alice Sola Kim
• "Trends of Japanese Science Fiction in the 2000s" by Motoko Tanaka
• Japan Sinks by Sakyo Komatsu
• Haruki Murakami generally
• Evangelion, directed by Hideaki Anno
• The Count of Monte Cristo anime
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
• Alan Moore's run with the character Supreme

Follow me on Bluesky here, and Adam here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the twelfth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

This week, Tracy Rae Bowling and I discussed how insane this year is already making us feel, our experiences with various youth programs, and the different kinds of reading resolutions that we might consider. The following are the links to the articles from which we borrowed the resolutions:

1. https://theconversation.com/what-are-your-new-years-reading-resolutions-6-dedicated-readers-share-theirs-269381
2. https://www.scarymommy.com/lifestyle/new-years-reading-resolutions-2026
3. https://theeverygirl.com/reading-resolutions/
4. https://www.penguinteen.com/bookish-new-years-resolutions/

We'll see you again soon.

Follow me on Bluesky here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

This is the eleventh episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

For this week's Personal Pan Holiday Special, I decided to do something a little bit different, sharing with you an essay that I wrote about my time as a writer in residence in South Korea, plus a guide that I wrote for others who participate in the residency in the future. I hope you enjoy both, and I'll see you next year.

Follow me on Bluesky here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.

This is the tenth episode of Library Pizza, a podcast about reading hosted by the guy writing this: Mike Meginnis.

This week's guest is Buzz Poole, cofounder of Sandorf Passage. Texts discussed include but are not limited to:

• Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis
• Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost by Donald Niedekker, translated by Jonathan Reeder
• Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perišić, translated by Will Firth
• Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perišić, translated by Vesna Maric
• No Signal Area by Robert Perišić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
• She Who Remains by Rene Karabas, translated by Izidora Angel
• The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye
• Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
• Horror and Huge Expenses by Robert Perišić, translated by Will Firth
• The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated by Angela Rodel
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
• James by Percivel Everett
• Stranger by C. J. Cherryh
• The works of Magda Szabo in general, of course
• The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
• Ice by Anna Kavan
• The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated by Daniel Levin Becker
• The works of C. S. Lewis
• The Witches by Roald Dahl

Buzz mentions writing an article for the Lit Hub that is partly about reading to his son; it's this: "The Wisdom of Sendak: Children Are Wild, Honest, Immoral Beings".

Follow me on Bluesky here, and Buzz here.

You can and should join Disc Horse, the Library Pizza discord, at https://discord.gg/UAsDrEeWFv

My thanks to Tracy Rae Bowling for the very dignified theme song, and my friend Blorb for the art.