Book Fight

Dec 23 2024 570 ep. 63 mins 3.8k

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A podcast where writers talk honestly about books, writing, and the literary world. Hosted by Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister, authors and long-time editors for Barrelhouse, a nonprofit literary magazine and book publisher. New episodes every other week, with bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers.

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Holiday Spectacular: SKRUJ!

Dec 23 2024 81 mins

It's that time of year again: our annual holiday episode, where we invite several members of the Barrelhouse editorial team to read and discuss a very sexy holiday-themed novel. This year's book is SKRUJ: Holidate with an Alien, by bestselling author Honey Phillips. The book is a retelling, of a sort, of the Dickens Christmas classic, but starring a grumpy alien man with a weird (

The Pink Panther

Dec 16 2024 66 mins

We wrap up our noir season with one final episode, this one discussing the 1963 Peter Sellers movie The Pink Panther, and the series more generally, which spoofed many of the tropes of the noir/detective genres. We also look back at the season--what we learned from diving into the noir genre, and our favorite books. If you like this episode, we've been doing an entire series on noi

Nadira Goffe on Blacktop Wasteland

Dec 09 2024 72 mins

We welcome Nadira Goffe (culture writer for Slate) to talk about a Black, Southern noir from S.A. Cosby. We learn about Nadira's love of the Fast and the Furious franchise, her fear of actual driving, and her mixed feelings about an over-the-top metaphor. Plus: Mike gets pedantic about dialogue tags, and Tom realizes there's a limit to how many car-chase sequences he's willing to r

Tod Goldberg on Winter's Bone

Dec 02 2024 82 mins

We welcome back best-selling crime novelist Tod Goldberg to talk about one of his favorite books, by one of his favorite authors. Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel was the basis for the 2012 film of the same name, which netted Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar nomination at the age of 20. The movie is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, though the book's musical language and rich detail

Daniel DiFranco on Do Evil in Return

Nov 25 2024 69 mins

We're joined by novelist and high-school music teacher Daniel DiFranco (Panic Years, Devil on My Trail) to discuss the Margaret Millar novel Do Evil in Return, a staple of the noir genre. We talk about the line between serious and campy, how to move plot forward in a novel, and the difficulty of endings. For more about our guest, including where to find his books, check out his we

Joanna Pearson on Mary Gaitskill

Nov 18 2024 73 mins

We welcome Joanna Pearson (author, most recently, of Bright and Tender Dark), who makes the case that we should put Mary Gaitskill's short stories in the "noir" category--or at least mark them as noir-adjacent. We discuss two specific Gaitskill stories, "The Other Place" and "The Girl on the Plane," as well as the particular darkness of the Gaitskill universe. We also talk with Joa

Steph Cha on The Postman Always Rings Twice

Nov 11 2024 56 mins

We're joined by Steph Cha (author of Your House Will Pay) to talk about a famous California hardboiled novel none of us had ever read. What will it took us about tramps, insurance fraud, and the relative difficulty of staging a fake car-related murder? And what's the deal with that postman, with his infernal ringing? Steph, who has written several acclaimed crime novels herself, h

Charlie Demers on The Comedy is Finished

Nov 04 2024 78 mins

We're joined by comedian and writer Charlie Demers to discuss a novel that the famous crime writer Donald Westlake finished in the early '80s but which wasn't published until after his death. At the time, he apparently worried that the plot--about a famous comedian kidnapped by a Weather Underground-style group of revolutionaries--was too similar to the Martin Scoresese movie The K

In a Lonely Place w/ Isaac Butler

Oct 28 2024 76 mins

The 1947 Dorothy Hughes novel In a Lonely Place is considered a hallmark of the noir genre, and also something of a feminist reimagining of those genre's tropes. We're joined by Isaac Butler (author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act) to talk about some of the book's narrative tricks, including an unreliable third-person narrator, and how it subverts the genre's "fe

Sarah Weinman on The Blunderer

Oct 21 2024 59 mins

We're back! This episode kicks off a new season of the podcast, and this one's all about noir. In our first installment, guest Sarah Weinman (author of Scoundrel, and The Real Lolita) joins us to discuss a Patricia Highsmith novel, The Blunderer, about a rather hapless man who, despite not actually killing his wife, manages to convince nearly everyone that he has. If you like the s