Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.

I'm Greta Johnson.

I'm Trisha Bobita.

And this is the Nerdat podcast.

This week, we talk with author Marisha Pessel, whose sophomore novel Night Film comes out this week.

And we'll hear about Trisha's trip to an all-night flea market out in the suburbs of Illinois.

Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis. That's, of course, a clip from one of my favorite films, Blues Brothers, and you'll hear

why that's relevant to my trip to the flea market a little later. You know, I am curious to figure out

how that ties in. Oh, it does.

Greta, you introduced me to Marisha Pessel's work because you're a huge fan of her first novel, special topics in calamity physics.

What do you love about that book? Well, it was a really fun read, partly because the narrator blue has such a strong personality.

And, you know, there's just a lot of really great literary references and a lot of really goofy vocabulary words. And, you know, it's especially a word nerd book, I think.

So I was especially excited to find out that Marisha Pessel was coming out with a second book after like

seven years of writing. And she's been working on this book so long that about four years ago, she spoke

to a college and gave a quote in the speech, sort of, you know, quoting a filmmaker to give an

inspirational point. And afterwards, people realized that they didn't know who that filmmaker was,

and they couldn't because she was quoting the name of the filmmaker who was going to be in the novel

night film, which just came out.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories about her.

It's totally nuts, but it's also really not difficult to picture just given how much

detail is in this book.

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