In the late summer of 2018, The New York Times reported that St. Martin's Press had signed a seven-figure deal for a "tell-all book" about President Trump's White House.

The amount of the advance raised eyebrows because the author, Cliff Sims, had served 18 months in that White House without making much of a name for himself anywhere else.

Who was this Cliff Sims? What did he mean to Trump? And what might a book called Team of Vipers add to what had already been written and said about the snake pit at 1600?

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This past fall, I was invited to be in the room when my niece gave birth to her third child (Hello, Liam!). As a writer who has no children and never will, I recognized this as an educational opportunity I could not pass up. What I did not realize was that it would be exactly the experience I needed to prepare myself for this review.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been retold endlessly by now, from the numerous film, TV, and YouTube adaptations of the original novel to the many, many books that use its structure, characters, and story arc to do something different. P&P has been adapted into a zombie story (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith), a mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James), a tale of a contemporary 30-something English spinster (Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding).

In a quiet college town — the fictional town of Santa Lora, in southern California — one by one, students fall victim to a bizarre contagious disease. They fall into a deep sleep, and don't wake up. In fact, some will never wake up. And the disease spreads throughout the town, quickly and indiscriminately.