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Thank you. Hi, I'm David Barr-Curtley, author of the book Save Me Please and other stories, and welcome to episode

601 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy. Today on the show, we'll be discussing Fantastic Fiction at KGB,

a monthly reading series in New York City that's featured authors such as Joyce Carol Oates,

China Mieville, Peter Straub, and Samuel Ardilaney, and I'm joined today by my good friend

Matthew Cressel, who served as co-host of Fantastic Fiction since 2008. He's the author of the

novels King of Shards, Queen of Static, and Space Trucker Jess, the short story collection

histories within us, and the nonfiction book Dispatches from the Outer Deep,

a guide to writing, editing, submitting, and publishing short and long fiction. He also hosts the

Nerdcount podcast along with Mercurio Di Rivera. And now here's her interview with Matthew

Cressel. All right, so we're here with Matthew Cressel. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Dave.

Okay. So for people who have never been to Fantastic Fiction at KGB and who have maybe never been to a book event at all, could you just describe what the experience of going to KGB will be like for a first time visitor?

It will be like going to Disneyland for the first time.

That's a big question.

And I think to set everything up, you have to kind of understand the location of the KGB bar and the reading series itself to really understand it. So the bar is located on the second floor of a three-story walk-up building, what they call

...