Please note that Our Young, Roving Correspondent will be conducting a live conversation with the writer Marshall Klimasewiski on Thursday, February 28, 2008, at 7:00 PM.

The event will take place at McNally Robinson, located at 52 Prince Street, New York, NY. The event is free, the conversation will also be available later as a podcast, and we will also be taking questions from the audience. Thankfully, we have managed to duct-tape Mr. Segundo to his chair to prevent him from disrupting the discussion. (The idea was kindly provided to us by the gentlemen behind The Signal.)

For more details on this event, go here.

To listen to our previous conversation with Mr. Klimasewiski, go here.

We’ll be putting up full capsules for the last seven shows very soon, as well as a future podcast collecting Our Young, Roving Correspondent’s crazed coverage of the National Book Awards. (The total backlog of podcasts now stands at eleven. So bear with us.) In the meantime, four new podcasts are now ready for your enjoyment — no small feat, seeing as how we were barely able to wrangle Mr. Segundo from his stupor. Bear with us while we work out the kinks in the next few days.

Thanks to our loyal listeners, we’ve met the $800 goal. Thanks to all who were kind enough to contribute. A gaggle of fresh podcasts will be ungaggled quite soon.

In almost four years of running Reluctant and two years of running The Bat Segundo Show, I have never openly asked for money on this website. Sure, there’s been a donation bar on the side, and some of you have graciously pitched in. I thank those of you who have. There’s also been some advertising, which has likewise helped. But this website has largely been run on my own dime. I’ve done my best to stimulate conversation and to make this a place for the literary community to connect.

So it pains me to make the following announcement. I’ve always tried to be self-sufficient here, ensuring that I can provide you, the readers and the listeners, with free content about the literary news and developments of our time.

But here’s the cold hard truth: Due to an unforeseen development on the advertising front, I’m out $800 this month. I’ve made some calls and spoken to a few people, and it appears that this is $800 I may not see for a while. The specific individuals responsible for collecting these monies have as much interest in performing their duties or informing me of their progress as the CIA. While I’ll be all right next month for income that has nothing to do with advertising, in the meantime, I’m now facing a shortfall that I’ll have to make up in the forthcoming weeks.

Understand that I don’t believe that the world owes me a living. But what this means is that, if I do not find a way to make up this shortfall this week, about seven Segundo interviews with some of today’s leading contemporary authors I had set up for the next three weeks will have to be canceled while I find immediate work elsewhere. (There are two interviews scheduled for this week and I plan to go ahead with these. And there are also some exciting interviews in the can that I hope to release once this financial setback has been resolved, including a provocative conversation with Steven Pinker and a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy.)

Now I don’t want to have to cancel these interviews. Trust me on this: these are all extremely interesting people. But if I cannot get $800 by the end of this week, I’m going to have to.

Here’s where you come in. As an experiment, I’m seeing if you — the readers and listeners who have been coming here — can help make up this $800 shortfall through donations. I’m not asking for a yearly salary like Jason Kottke once did and I certainly don’t want to make a regular habit of asking readers for donations. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of things, collectively speaking, this is not a lot of dough.

I’ve produced 145 of these podcasts so far and made them available over the past two years for free. And I would like to continue devoting my time and energies doing this. As we all know, the number of outlets for in-depth literary interviews is shrinking. And I’ve been doing my best to fill in the gap with questions not usually asked of authors, careful reading of the books, and vigorous research.

If at some point, you’ve enjoyed any of the podcasts or any of the content here, please take some time to click on the Donation button below. If even sixteen of you contribute $50, then we’re back in business. Even if you can contribute $10, $5, beer money, it all helps. Let’s see if we can’t conquer this shortfall together. When I’ve raised around $800, I’ll remove this post and continue with business as usual.

And, as an added incentive, for those who contribute $10 or more, I’ll throw in a homemade chapbook containing an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Humanity Unlimited, an excerpt from my play, Wrestling an Alligator, a brief history of Bat Segundo’s sordid past, along with a few other items. The chapbook is only available through a donation.

Thanks very much for your time.

Bat Segundo is now on Facebook. How he got there is anybody’s guess, but all parties are advised to be extremely careful.

We’re experiencing some server problems on the main site, but five new podcasts will be unveiled very soon, once this is remedied.

Three additional podcasts are now available. Capsules will be up in a day, but if you’re hungry for immediate Segundo, here are temporary links to the shows, three of four subsequent shows in our Kate series: #128 (Katherine Taylor and Mindy Schneider, 50:13), #129 (Katie Roiphe), and #130 (Katharine Weber and Levi Asher).

There are more podcasts coming next week, including an hour-long interview with a very important author. Pardon Our Young, Roving Correspondent’s raspy voice during some of these shows: he was suffering from a month-long bout of laryngitis.

The sixth Torrent pack of The Bat Segundo Show, containing Shows #101-120 and featuring interviews with Martin Amis, Ron Jeremy, Lionel Shriver, Berkeley Breathed, and many more fabulous people is now available at The Pirate Bay for your downloading pleasure.

Due to sickness and laryngitis that has gone on for almost two months now, it’s been difficult for the proprietors to update the site. And Mr. Segundo seems to have disappeared. We’re now in the process of tracking him down. There are plans to dramatically overhaul this site soon, but in the meantime, you can listen to Show #118 (Austin Grossman) here and Show #119 (Berkeley Breathed, Part One) here. There’s a twenty podcast backlog that should be caught up before summer’s end. Thanks for your patience!

The Bat Segundo Show has recently moved its headquarters from one coast to another. We are working to rectify the disarray on this page and will be providing capsules for previous shows and more podcasts very soon!

Another quick little offering:

Torrent Packs #4 and #5 of The Bat Segundo Show have been released to The Pirate Bay.

Pack #4 contains Shows #61-80, and features interviews with Alison Bechdel, Daniel Handler, Tommy Chong, Nora Ephron, Scott Smith, Richard Dawkins, and many others. You can download the torrent here.

Pack #5 contains Shows #81-100, and features interviews with David Lynch, Mary Gaitskill, Kate Atkinson, Francine Prose, Nina Hartley, Richard Ford, Christopher Moore and many others. You can download th torrent here.

There will be a sixth pack, once time can be found to complete more shows.