Starting next week, the nation will turn its eyes to basketball, to college basketball, and its annual March Madness tournament.
But... not quite all of the nation.
Some of the nation is, well, nerdier than that.
The Morning News to the rescue! Every year, they pit sixteen (well, seventeen this year, when you account for the play-in matchup, which already happened) new fiction titles against each other in a March Madness-style tournament to award one book the, uh, the Rooster (see above).
And for the second year running, we're glomming onto their deal and making a show out of it. This hour, we pick up two matches (and one huge upset!) into the first round with Tournament Commissioner Kevin Guilfoile and the three biggest super-reader nerds we could find (and that doesn't even count Colin).
GUESTS:
- Rand Richards Cooper - Novelist, essayist, and critic
- Alex Dueben - A writer who frequently complains that this show spends too much time on television and not enough on books
- Kevin Guilfoile - Tournament of Books' Tournament Commissioner and the author, most recently, of A Drive Into the Gap
- Julia Pistell - A writer and founding member of Sea Tea Improv and a host of the podcasts Literary Disco and WNPR’s The Radius Project
You can join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Colin McEnroe, Greg Hill, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show.