Kobo in Conversation

This week we're bringing you a conversation Michael Tamblyn had in 2021 with Natalie Zina Walschots about her extremely fun novel called Hench. It's about a world where superheroes are out there saving the day in super ways, while villains, who are a lot like you and me, run organizations bent on taking over the world while also trying to keep scores up on Glassdoor.
Natalie's just released a sequel to Hench, and it's called Villain. 
 
[From 2021:]
We learned about some of the fantastical worlds Natalie enjoyed exploring as a young reader "often for sheer escapism," as well as the writers she drew inspiration from while starting out as a writer herself, and as a lifelong student of supervillainy:
Robert O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Z for Zachariah
High fantasy including J. R. R. Tolkien, but also Shannara, Dragonlance, and "anything with a wizard holding an orb on the cover" or "a skeleton holding a sword"
Christian Bök, Karen Solie, bp Nichol, and other writers "doing super weird things with language and the structural materiality of language..."
Soon I Will Be Invincible "was the first book I read from the perspective of a supervillain."
"Paradise Lost is really important to me ... the relationship between Satan the adversary to the world informs the way I write villains."
Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where "a character who's a villain in one context becomes the protagonist in another."
Vicious by V E Schwab
Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and various writings of Catherynne M. Valente for their "messed up fairy tale feel."

Nathan Maharaj spoke with physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of the 2021 book The Disordered Cosmos, a highly personal reflection on the human and inherently flawed practice of scientific inquiry and her career as a Black Jewish scientist. Her new book is The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. In it she explains to readers, what's really going on with quantum cats? what does a light-swallowing black hole actually look like? what can we learn about quantum theory from the Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra? —and a whole lot more.
Why Chanda Prescod-Weinstein sees hope in cosmic curiosity

Hosts Michael Tamblyn and Nathan Maharaj dove deep on the controversy around the book Shy Girl, which was cancelled by its publisher who alleged it was largely AI-generated.
Links on Shy Girl:
The video from January 2026 that seems to have led to Shy Girl's cancellation: i'm pretty sure this book is ai slop - YouTube
Publishing news journalist Alexandra Alter on the controversy over the cancellation of Shy Girl: A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. - The New York Times
Publishing industry analyst Thad McIlroy on what NYT omitted from their piece: I Broke the Year's Biggest Literary Story. The New York Times Took the Credit | The Walrus
Two very "inside baseball" overviews of what happened: The New Publishing Standard's deep dive on Shy Girl
Publisher's Weekly industry analysis

What might be the last extant page on any of Hachette's sites about the book: Shy Girl: Read the femgore revenge novel that EVERYONE is talking about! by Mia Ballard - Books - Hachette Australia
Other links from this episode:
Why AI detection is hard People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text - ACL Anthology (mistakenly attributed to MIT in the episode)
Past episodes of this show that touched on the use of AI in book publishing: Michael bets on "AI Sally Rooney" (from October 2024)
Anna Gomez enlisted AI for research assistance when writing a romance road trip (November 2024)
Sean Michaels wrote a book about AI and art by using AI for parts of it (November 2023)

More author interviews at kobo.com/conversation
Find past Booktalking episodes here

Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Heather Marshall. She is a writer of historical fiction, including her 2022 debut bestselling novel Looking for Jane and 2024's with The Secret History of Audrey James. Heather Marshall's new book is Liberty Street. It's the story of a young journalist's quest to expose the cruelty and corruption of the Mercer Women's Prison from the inside, the women she meets there, and a police detective trying to uncover a secret 30 years later.
How Heather Marshall brings readers into places of the past

Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Rainbow Rowell. She's the author of books including Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, as well as the novel Slow Dance, which she discussed on the show in 2024. Rainbow Rowell's new book is the novel Cherry Baby. It's about a woman named Cherish, who everybody calls Cherry, at a moment in her life when her marriage seems to have ended and she's figuring out what comes next. 
Why Rainbow Rowell's Cherry Baby had to be her sexiest book yet