This episode we’re discussing Literary Fiction! We talk about books that win awards, writing as art, reading books because other people think they’re good, whether YA literary fiction exists, literary fiction vs literary merit, real vs unreal reading, the pandemic allowing us to check out quick read books for months at a time, the BDSM awards, bookshelf bragging, and more!

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In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards

Things We Read This Month

• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• • Spoilers for this book in the podcast!
• A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Other Media We Mentioned

• Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
• Us Conductors by Sean Michaels
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
• Loose Time by RJ Edwards (won the 2019 National Magazine Award for fiction)
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Links, Articles, and Things

• Literary Fiction Readers’ Advisory with Meghan Savage
• • Literary Fiction guide
• Literary Fiction vs. Genre Fiction
• Is Literary Fiction Elitist? 
• Forget Literary Fiction. Is Reading Anything Elitist?
• Yes, literature is elitist… thank God!
• Crepuscular (definition)
• Magic realism (Wikipedia)
• Speculative fiction (Wikipedia)
• Washoe (chimpanzee) (Wikipedia)
• National Geographic, June, 1980 (Living With Orangutans)
• Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) (Twitter)
• Lego Treehouse that Matthew and Anna built
• • Here’s a photo of someone else’s copy of the Young Animal poster that Anna mentioned

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Join us again on Tuesday, June 16th we’ll each be pitching a book we think all of us should read and discuss on the podcast! You get to vote!

Then on Tuesday, July 7th we’ll be talking about the genre of Entertainment (Non-Fiction)!