Welcome back to literary friction. I'm Octavia Bright here with my co-host Carrie Plitt,

and we are so happy to be back in the studio together. It's been a while. Yeah, it really has.

How you doing, Carrie? I'm good. I'm a little bit. I shouldn't still be jet lagged, but I'm a little bit jet lagged this morning. So slowly waking up, I hope, through the course of the recording this morning. But otherwise, very pleased to see your face. I mean, I did see your face over the summer, but it does feel like we're back to school. Yeah, definitely. The microphone obscuring the lower part of your face is what I'm used to. Also, there's no sheds about it. Jetlag takes as long as it takes. Thank you. Thank you for supporting me. I'm looking forward to you being really like freaky and in the twilight zone throughout this recording session. Yeah, I'm a little dopey.

I bump into a lot of things and I'm quite clumsy. It's adorable. Oh, thanks. Well, where are we

starting? Oh, what are we doing? We're back. Well, Octavia, let me tell you, this is Minisode 7.

Is it now?

Yeah, we're back from our break.

We're feeling good.

We have an incredible autumn lined up, but we thought we'd start you out with this little bonus episode.

So we have a slightly different program for this minisode, but first we have a few announcements, don't we? We do indeed.

So we've got a live event with zadie actual

smith zadie fucking smith that's zadie smith that's what i'm going to say zadie smith who is a writer who

you know a few of you may have heard of and i and i'm pretty sure that carrie and i have both

recommended her work many many times across the many years that we've been doing this show. And we're going to be recording a live event with her up in Sheffield on October 3rd. Please come and join us if you're based up that way, even if you're not, hop on a train. It's going to be absolutely bloody brilliant. If you can't make it, we are going to be releasing it as a podcast, but I think there's going to be something special about it. So yeah, we'd love to see you there. We are also launching some

literary friction merchandise. We're going to start with some really excellent tote bags,

which you might have seen some pictures of us clutching them gleefully on our various social media.

Gritting like absolute idiots. That's what we do best. So yeah, if you'd like to support us with a bit of cash, then watch this space. We'll give you more info when they're ready. We'll be sending them out. Hopefully international shipping available, but we're trying to figure all that out at the moment. And oh yeah, what else? Oh yeah. And we are also really excited to announce that we are this year the podcast in

residence at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Yeah. So we will be around the festival for the last

weekend from the 11th to the 13th of October. We are recording one of our podcasts there. We're

also going to be hosting a few events and sort of around hobnobbing with authors and schmoozing. Doing literary things. So, I mean, come to the festival, book some tickets or you can look forward to our updates and our show based there. Yeah, definitely. We will also be clutching our literary friction totes for the whole weekend. So if you want to see the merch in action, all right, I'll stop with the hard sell.

Yeah, we can't wait for that.

For now, though, for this slightly unusual minnesota, we have half of a live event I did at

...