All right, everybody, welcome to The Librarian is In, the New York Public Library's podcast about books, culture, and what to read next.

I'm Gwen.

I'm Frank.

And we have a very special surprise today due to a slight technical glitch.

We're going to have our guest segment first.

So who else is here in our room?

I am Julia Pistel of the podcast Literary Disco.

Woo-hoo!

We are so excited to have you on.

Thank you for having me.

I'm super excited to be here.

So why don't you just start a little bit by telling us about literary disco and about how it started and maybe other cool book and author related things that you do? Sure. So literary disco is a podcast that was born out of a friendship that I had with two other guys in my MFA program, which I went

to at Bennington many years ago. And we found ourselves talking about books of all kinds,

classics, pop, fiction, nonfiction, poetry even. And after the program ended, a couple of years from behind, we really missed those conversations.

So he said, let's do them and let's record them. So those two other people are writer strong, who is an actor and producer.

And we also have Todd Goldberg, who directs a creative writing program of his own out in California now.

So the three of us, and I'm from Connecticut, so the three of us jump on Google Hangouts once or twice a month

and just talk about any books that we are reading or care about or think about.

And it's just a blast.

And Todd would also want you to mention that he is now a New York Times bestselling author as well.

He is, yes. He and his brother. He and his brother are both on the New York Times bestseller list right now together, fighting it out.

I heard the podcast where he announced that to all of you is very sweet. He was clearly very excited, but I was like, yeah, we got it. He actually, you know what? I think he reminds me a little bit of me, a little over much sometimes. But like I said, I think we said before we started like, you know, I love the way you clearly seem like friends. We are friends. That is real. But like you said before, it's like, you know, you can give your friends space to be who they are, but sometimes you don't have to participate if you think the direction might be going off in a little way. I mean, Gwen and I do that too, but.

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