This week we bring you The World According to Garp according to Andrew – we breeze through John Irving’s best-known “middlebrow” novel, touching on its feminist leanings, its surprising progressivism as it regards the transgendered, and both the dark humor and the just-plain-darkness lurking around every corner. This week’s episode brought to you by Blue…

This week we’re joined by social media maven (and friend of the show) Margaret H. Willison to talk about Christopher Pike’s Last Act, an early entry from the author’s prolific career writing YA thrillers. We’re here to solve the mystery of a murder in a high school drama club, but our conversation ranges far and…

This week, we tackle Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. It’s an account of Lorde’s childhood and early adulthood, focusing specifically on her experiences as a black, out, gay woman in New York City in the 1950s.

Mark Haddon’s book about a teenager with “Behavioral Problems” is notable less for what happens in it and more for its perspective. It’s an affecting study of human thought and behavior that we can’t ruin even by talking about Subway for five minutes!

“I am an invisible man,” says the unnamed narrator at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man. He then walks the reader through the painful journey that led to this realization, from the Jim Crow South to a less explicitly divided New York City. When we aren’t discussing the narrator’s struggle to fight for…

Who has the conch? Somebody find the glasses! We’re trapped on a podcast island with the amazing Gwen Glazer and Frank Collerius of the New York Public Library’s show The Librarian Is In. Actually, Gwen and Frank were kind enough to have us in their studio to chat about William Golding’s novel The Lord of…

What will you remember? What will you be remembered for? Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven asks these questions of most of its characters as they struggle to survive before and after an apocalyptic flu outbreak. We also talk Mandel’s work crunching data on novels, National Days, Corporate Speak, and what we won’t miss when…

We the Hosts of Overdue, in Order to form a more perfect Podcast, establish Humor, insure earbud Tranquility, provide for uncommon offense, promote our listeners’ Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Goofs to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this podcast on the Constitution for the United States of America. No really, we…

This week, Andrew brings his oddly deep and specific knowledge of The Simpsons to bear on Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. In a post-apocalyptic world in which Simpsons quotes were treated as currency, he would pretty much run the place. This week’s show brought to you by Penn State World Campus.

Welcome to 2017! Our first book of the year is Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, a somewhat forgotten mid-century classic about an author shaping her world through fiction. Because it’s us, we HAD to spend time talking about the other Angels and Elizabeths Taylor in our lives. We also find time to cover cheaters and lies,…