Our little goblins and ghouls may still be counting their candy from Halloween and Thanksgiving is still several weeks away but small businesses including bookstores are encouraging shoppers to start grabbing those gifts early this year for multiple reasons. So today we talk to our favorite bookseller, Sam Miller of Carmichael Books in Louisville, about what books and gifts readers may want to check out this holiday season.

We all probably need a good laugh right about now and our guest this week, humorist Andrew Shaffer, is the one to provide it. Andrew is the New York Times best-selling author of the Obama Biden series, a buddy detective mystery series which includes Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again. His new book that comes out in November is called Secret Santa and is a clash of the holidays ; Halloween and Christmas; a comedic book that combines horror and holiday vibes about a holiday office party gone bad. He is the author of 11 books in several genres but says that humor is the theme that ties all his books together.

It’s spooky season and we would be remiss if we didn’t explore a bit the things that make us unsettled and feel that four letter word FEAR. Our guest this week, Tim Waggoner, is a horror and dark fantasy writer who has been recognized in his field with awards such as the Shirley Jackson and the Bram Stoker Award. He is also an educator at heart. He is a professor at Sinclair College in Dayton OH where he teaches a wide variety of writing classes from basic composition all the way up to novel writing and tips for getting published. He has recently published a book that is a comprehensive guide to the craft of writing horror fiction called Writing in the Dark.

Two years ago our guest Deedee Cummings decided she wanted to introduce a book festival to the city of Louisville, an event found in many other large cities but missing here. She and her team spent those two years planning and scheduling an event all about books and reading only to have 2020 happen, a terrible, no good, very bad year that has served as a wet blanket for most kinds of fun. Deedee was, of course, disappointed, but she was not deterred.

Our episode today was recorded during Banned Books Week, a weeklong annual event sponsored by the American Library Association to celebrate the freedom to read and bring awareness to both current and past attempts to censor books in libraries and schools.

We believe this topic is one that you can think about any time of the year, not just for one designated week so we wanted to explore the topic with our guest, Natalie McCall, a librarian and head of youth services at the Mill Valley Public Library in the Bay area of California. She is also the host of a podcast called Eight Books That Made Me where she has conversations with Young Adult authors about 5 books that influenced them growing up and 3 books they encourage readers to check out now.

Our guest this week, Ashley Blooms, grew up in rural Kentucky, was a John Grisham Writing Fellow at the University of Mississippi and worked for Tor.com, an online magazine that published a wide range of sci- fi/fantasy short stories, commentary, and pop culture. Her debut novel, Every Bone a Prayer, was published last month, has been recommended by NPR and Buzzfeed and has received praise from some of my favorite authors like Silas House and Alix Harrow. Ashley wants to make a space in Appalachian literature for more fantastical stories and not only the literary realism that is usually that trademark of the subgenre.

Our guest this week, Tabby Pawlitzki, is helping us continue our series on Global Readers. Once a season, we talk with a book lover who grew up in another country but has made the United States their home. In seasons 1 and 2 we talked to readers from Somalia and Ireland. In Season 3 we are exploring Germany. Fortunately Instagram has made meeting book-loving people who come from all over the world much easier which is how we connected with Tabby. She joined us remotely from her home in Los Angeles.

Our guest today, Kris Keppeler, is an actor and audiobook narrator who has narrated over 50 books in her career. She uses her own studio located in her home in Washington State. She is also a consultant for other people who want to do what she does, including authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks.

Our guest this week, Ellen Birkett Morris, has an affection for small things. She says she was born prematurely and was terribly small at birth. She wonders if this is where her fascination with beautiful things coming in small packages began. Ellen is the author of a book of poetry and a new collection of short stories called Lost Girls. What readers may notice about her stories is that though they are small in length, they are powerful in meaning. Each story focuses on a passing moment in the lives of the girls and women she writes about. Ellen says she loves dipping in and out of a person’s story to find the small snippet of time that packs an emotional punch.

Our guest today certainly does. When Clare Wallace visits a new place, she always looks for the closest used bookstore. This gave her the idea to open The Rosewater, aptly named after her favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, which she envisions as a comforting living room for everybody. Clare is the executive director of South Louisville Community Ministries, a nonprofit that provides emergency assistance for residents of South Louisville facing crisis, and she was looking for a visible way to do outreach in the neighborhood. The bookstore serves several purposes; to create a warm community space, to bring life to parts of the neighborhood that have seen hard times, to provide transitional employment for residents in crisis, and to offer a service that the neighbors want.