This month, the nation turns its eyes to basketball, to college basketball, to 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, when you account for the play-in matchup) new fiction titles against each other in a March Madness-style tournament to award one book the, uh, the Rooster.
And for the third year running, we're glomming onto their deal and making a show out of it.
This time, though, we've gone our own way a bit and picked our own final four out of their 17 options. And we'll actually pit them against each other and pick a champion.
Our semi-final matchups:
Michael Chabon's Moonglow
vs.
Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
and
Francine Prose's Mister Monkey
vs.
Nathan Hill's The Nix
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
- Julia Pistell - A writer and founding member of Sea Tea Improv and a host of the Literary Disco podcast
You can join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show.
