'Brut' by Sam Tallent, With Patton Oswalt

Patton Oswalt and Anthony Jeselnik open by comparing Detroit to a post-apocalyptic film set—"free sets of the apocalypse," as a cab driver once told Oswalt—before settling into the real business of the episode: Sam Tallent’s new novel Brut. Tallent’s previous book, Running the Light, is one of the few novels about stand-up comedy that both men consider authentic. Oswalt calls it a book that "doesn't shy away from the awkwardness" of life on the road, and Jeselnik has called it the best novel about stand-up he has ever read. Brut is something else entirely: a hitman novel.

What Brut is and how it works

The plot is deliberately simple. The protagonist, Bobby Beaujolais, is a former military man who worked private security for celebrities. He does his job so effectively—"John Wick shit"—that he gets caught on camera, earning the nickname "Jason Bourne" and ruining his career. The book explains why a famous bodyguard is actually a liability, a counterintuitive point that Jeselnik calls one of the novel’s strengths. Bobby becomes a contract killer, botches a job by killing an extra person (the daughter of a powerful Italian mafia figure known as the Saint of Killers), and is given an impossible task: kill the father at the daughter’s funeral, surrounded by armed mourners, or be killed himself.