Welcome to GabFest Reeds for February 2024. I'm David Plotz, one of the hosts of

the slate political gadfest. Kylie Reid's new novel, Come and Get It, is a funny, sneakily tense

story of a college dorm at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

A residential advisor and a college senior named Millie Cousins strikes up a friendship.

I use that term in quotes.

A friendship with a visiting professor Agatha Paul who wants to eavesdrop on students in the dorm for an ethically dubious

research project that she's working on. Come and get it explores what happens when Millie and

Agatha and the students in the dorm, notably two young women who are sweetmates, Kennedy and

Tyler, or Toller, start interacting and spying on each other and pranking each other

and fantasizing about each other and above all using money and the threat of money to warp how

they interact. Come and get it confirms what Kylie's glorious bestselling first novel,

Such a Fun Age, suggested, which is that she has the best ear for actual human speech of any American writer. So, Kylie, welcome to Gapfest reads.

Thank you very, very much. I'm excited to chat. I want to put you right to work. So will you read

us a short passage to give us a feel for how come and get it sounds and how you're writing sounds when you hear people talking?

I'm going to read from what I believe is chapter two or three, and this is RA move and day, and these are two RAs just talking.

Millie laughed through her nose.

Was Joni in Southgate with you?

No, she wasn't.

Thank God, Colette said.

But we both worked at Clubhouse Fitness last summer, and she was annoying for obvious reasons.

But then, okay, so when the minimum wage changed from 8 to 850, I made this

presentation on how I should be getting 950 because I was killing it over there. I got like

...