Sandra Cisneros' first novel is a collection of rapid-fire vignettes about childhood and friendship and race and America. We also check in with the darker side of our recurring guest host, the Iowa Writers Workshop. Our theme music was composed by N... Details

This contemporary Victorian story is chockablock with twists and turns, backstabs and broadsides, as well as Dickensian pornfiends. It also features a steamy lesbian romance between two women desperate to escape their own circumstances. We dive into ... Details

Enjoy another episode of our latest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine ... Details

Groundhog Day meets the apocalypse in this week's book, in which the end of the world is approaching at an ever-faster pace through each of Harry August's successive lifetimes spent on earth. Hope you like paradoxes!  Our theme music was composed by... Details

DeLillo's award-winning breakthrough novel is a satirical rumination on the fear of death while living in a hyper-consumerist America inundated with information delivered by modern technology. Did we mention it was written in the 80s? Our theme musi... Details

This week's book observes society from the outside, asking occasionally uncomfortable questions about what it means to "progress" and to "fit in" and who gets to decide whether a person is doing those things. Our theme music was composed by Nick Ler... Details

We close out Spooktober with a cornucopia of spooky stories from a state we both have a relationship to. Join us for a conversation about ghostly grandpas, paranormal presidents, and spectral students. For more on our bonus episodes, head to patreon... Details

For the Big 500, we go to Sweden to solve a murder and also some financial crimes. And much like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we also go on at some length about the specs of classic Macintosh computers. Our theme music was composed by Nick Leran... Details

Eight stories. Eight women (and plenty more). Eight experiments in genre and form that each explore modern horrors. Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection is filled with weird fiction and intimate nightmares, making it a fitting entry fo... Details

A run-down mansion decades past its former glory, a headstrong heroine, a creepy family, and mushrooms all come together to form a perfect, spooky storm in this week's episode. Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis. Advertise on Overdue Se... Details

Spooktober continues! A narrator wanders rooms in his old house, telling the reader stories about his life. Is he an old man responding to a psychological evaluation? Is he a ghost recounting (and selectively editing) his best and worst memories? Wil... Details

Spooktober 2021 kicks off with a book about a jerk who turned himself invisible and then was still a jerk! The titular invisible man is a forerunner to a hundred comic book villains, who all suffered some kind of scientific mishap at their own hands ... Details

Enjoy another episode of our newest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine ... Details

Natasha from the Unspoiled podcast joins us this week to hatch a podcast about Eragon, a book that borrows freely from every other fantasy/sci-fi story that existed as of its creation in the early 2000s.  Find more from Unspoiled here! Our theme mu... Details

It's time to solve the mystery of the Boxcar Children! (Or is it The Box-Car Children?) Warner's novel about a quartet of self-sufficient kiddos underwent a major revision 20 years after its debut AND it spawned dozens of mystery-focused sequels desp... Details

Craig and Andrew said they would record the podcast themselves. This very modern episode about a very modern novel discusses Woolf's signature writing style, the regrets of a postwar British people, and when (or where) you might find yourself Thinkin... Details

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning is mostly concerned with big historical questions like "what if nationality had nothing to do with geography" and "what if a boy could make toys come to life," but it also deals with things like "what if noticing g... Details

Everybody get up it's time to read now. We got a podcast goin' now. Welcome to the Space Jam! Join us as we talk about a storybook edition of the 1996 cartoon basketball commercial Space Jam, starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. Our theme music ... Details

After 488 episodes, we finally return to ol' Johnny Steinbeck. East of Eden mixes autobiography, pastoral fiction, and Biblical allegory -- a cocktail that has dismayed critics and excited audiences for decades. We dig into what works in this sprawli... Details

This book is a work of "faction" (that's "fact" plus "fiction") about Richard Nixon's interactions with the physical manifestation(s) of Uncle Sam in the run-up to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. So, uh, a weird one. Our theme music w... Details