Otherppl with Brad Listi | Books & Culture
Alle afleveringen
1.363 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Episode 358 — Janaka Stucky
13 mei 2015 · 1 uur 11 min
Janaka Stucky is the guest. His new poetry collection, The Truth is We Are Perfect, is available now from Third Man Books. Bill Knott says Lees meer
"Stucky’s verse has the power of the best East European poets—some of his poems seem to be perfect, magnificent, and instantly anthologizable. He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker."
And Phantasmaphile says
"Stucky has catapulted into the firmament of my favorite ecstatic writers alongside Diane di Prima, Bill Callahan, Hafiz, e.e. cummings, and Larkin Grimm."
Monologue topics: LA Weekly
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Episode 357 — Cate Dicharry
6 mei 2015 · 1 uur 18 min
Cate Dicharry is the guest. Her debut novel, The Fine Art of Fucking Up, is now available from Unnamed Press.
Kirkus Reviews calls it Lees meer"Funny and charmingly ridiculous."
And Jill Alexander Essbaum says
"Cate Dicharry’s comic timing is unimpeachable and though her characters are idiosyncratic and quirky, they are deeply dimensional and exceptionally real. A richly complicated and rewarding novel."
Monologue topics: Person of 2015, LA Weekly, my mom, mail
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Episode 356 — Erika Krouse
29 april 2015 · 1 uur 17 min
Erika Krouse is the guest. Her new novel, Contenders, is available now from Rare Bird Books. It is the official April pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
Bookslut says
"Krouse...writes with a pulse-pounding and engaging ferocity that grabs at the reader...Contenders is heart-racingly original."
And Steve Almond says
"Contenders is a knockout! I've never read anything like it. The marvelous Erika Krouse has crafted one of the most unforgettable heroines in modern fiction. Nina Black is not the kind of woman you'd want to meet in a dark alley. But she's precisely the kind of character I always hope to encounter in fiction: a badass streetfighter forced by fate to confront her capacity for maternal tenderness, her need for love, and the anguished contents of her heart."
Monologue topics: San Diego, roadtrips, carsickness, wipes, fatherhood, going to see a bluegrass band, catching up, the antisocial nature of live music. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 355 — Heidi Pitlor
22 april 2015 · 1 uur 13 min
Heidi Pitlor is the guest. She is the editor of the Best American Short Stories anthologies and the author of the new novel The Daylight Marriage, available now from Algonquin Books.
Stephen King calls it
"Hypnotically readable--I absolutely couldn't put it down. The structure is brilliant, and I turned the pages with increasing dread. This book is terrific.”
And Booklist, in a starred review, says
“Pitlor brings forth the emotions that surge beneath the surface with the precision and power of a conductor . . . This powerful analysis of how dreams become nightmares will make readers want to hold their loved ones close.”
Monologue topics: iTunes rating, pregnancy update, Dustin Hoffman.
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Episode 354 — Sarah Nicole Prickett
15 april 2015 · 1 uur 4 min
Sarah Nicole Prickett is the guest. She is the founder of Adult magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry.
Monologue topics: Ex Machina, artificial intelligence, hiking, nature, mountain lions. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 353 — Monica McClure
8 april 2015 · 1 uur 26 min
Monica McClure is the guest. Her debut poetry collection, Tender Data, is now available from Birds LLC.
NPR says
"McClure may be the poster-girl for a new generation of poets: irreverent, well-read, sexy, even dirty, snarky, but ultimately fighting an earnest battle against reductiveness and easy answers to the complex problems of the Internet age: 'Every citizen of this world is on trial/ I'm learning to speak legalese/ as I stroll through civil law like/ a gamine through a sample sale.'"
Monologue topics: the Michiko Kakutani April Fool's Day episode, mail, listener reactions
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Episode 352 — Michiko Kakutani
1 april 2015 · 1 uur 14 min
Michiko Kakutani is the guest. She is the chief book critic for the New York Times and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.
Monologue topics: kicking, worrying, mail, bless you, all businesses are awful.
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Episode 351 — Daniel Handler
25 maart 2015 · 1 uur 8 min
Daniel Handler is the guest. His new novel We Are Pirates is now available from Bloomsbury.
Booklist, in a starred review, says
"Handler (aka children's author Lemony Snicket) has never been known for writing precisely happy novels, and his latest certainly doesn't deviate. What could easily have been a slightly silly, fantastical romp becomes, instead, in Handler's capable hands, a macabre, darkly human portrayal of family dynamics and growing up in a world running low on adventure . . . peppered with black humor."
And Jess Walter says
"We Are Pirates will dazzle, disturb, and delight you. It might even do things to you that don't start with the letter D, like remind you what it's like to be young, or convince you that Daniel Handler can do anything."
Monologue topics: the dentist, cough, mail, work, fear, money, children.
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Episode 350 — Will Chancellor
18 maart 2015 · 1 uur 15 min
Will Chancellor is the guest. His debut novel, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, is now available from Harper.
The Daily Beast says
“To compare a debut novel to Infinite Jest is likely either too flippant or too generous, but consider the bona fides...Will Chancellor’s wonderful debut novel...more than merely promising, is one of the best of the year.”
And Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it
“Bracingly rich...the author maintains an almost thrillerlike pace while taking well-aimed shots at academic and art-market fads and helping two lost souls through essential transformations.”
Monologue topics: hellishness, annoying/hectic day, ATT customer service, ultrasounds.
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Episode 349 — Adam Robinson
11 maart 2015 · 1 uur 19 min
Adam Robinson is the guest. He is the founding editor of Publishing Genius Press.
Monologue topics: LA, yoga, celebrity sneezes, God bless you.
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Episode 348 — Timothy Willis Sanders
4 maart 2015 · 1 uur 26 min
Timothy Willis Sanders is the guest. His debut novel, Matt Meets Vik, is available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms.
Blake Butler says
"I have no idea how Timothy Willis Sanders is able to accumulate so many small reflections into such a mesmerizing mass. Matt Meets Vik makes maybe the most stripped-down paragraphs I've ever seen somehow hold a hundred thousand colors, emotions, tones, like if there were a website that made you forget all other websites ever existed, or that you're even still online. Hilarious, moving, insane, real."
And Megan Boyle says
"As I was reading Matt Meets Vik (and long after I'd finished), I couldn't get the voice of 'Matt' out of my head, like it gave my inner monologue extra-charming-sounding subwoofers. Everything I did felt funnier and more important. There are only a few books that get in my head the way Matt Meets Vik has. This is one of my favorite books. I didn't want it to end. I can see myself reading this many times."
Monologue topics: my daughter threw a fit, mail, Neem Karoli Baba
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Episode 347 — Stewart O'Nan
25 februari 2015 · 1 uur 19 min
Stewart O'Nan is the guest. His new novel, West of Sunset, is available now from Viking. It is the official Februrary pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
Maureen Corrigan, writing for The Washington Post, says
“[The] grim yet undeniably fascinating last act of Fitzgerald’s life is the subject of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeous new novel. . .West of Sunset is a pretty fine Hollywood novel, too, but it’s an even finer novel about a great writer’s determination to keep trying to do his best work.”
And George Saunders says
“O'Nan is an incredibly versatile and charming writer. This novel, which imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's troubled time in Hollywood (with cameos by Dorothy Parker, Bogie, and Hemingway), takes up (like much of O'Nan's work) that essential conundrum of grace struggling with paucity. One brilliant American writer meditating on another--what's not to love?”
Monologue topics: paranoia, pregnancy, fear, hovering, mail.
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Episode 346 — Halle Butler
18 februari 2015 · 1 uur 19 min
Halle Butler is the guest. Her debut novel, Jillian, is available now from Curbside Splendor.
Lindsay Hunter says
"This book is incredible. The deadpan way it nails what it is to be a human who lies to herself and tells different lies to everyone else makes me want to laugh and scream. It is hilarious and weird, my two favorite qualities in a book."
And Kirkus Reviews says
"[Jillian] offers up its characters for hatred and ridicule with such energy, obsessive detail and hopelessness that the reader can't help but read on, through exasperating flinches of sympathy and recognition. A novel that reads like rubbernecking or a junk-food binge, compelling a horrified fascination and bleak laughter in the face of outrageously painted everyday sadness."
Monologue topics: thanks, worry, sleeplessness, corporate pitchman fantasies, idealism, crazy people, Starbucks, Valentine's Day, my dog, jokes that fail to land.
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Episode 345 — Porochista Khakpour
11 februari 2015 · 1 uur 23 min
Porochista Khakpour is the guest. Her novel The Last Illusion is now available from Bloomsbury.
Claire Messud says
“Utterly original and compelling, Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion weaves Iranian myth with very contemporary American neurosis to create a bittersweet poetry all its own. This ambitious, exciting literary adventure is at once grotesque, amusing, deeply sad—and wonderful, too.”
And Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it
"An audaciously ambitious novel that teeters along a tightrope but never falls off."
Monologue topics: big news, superstition, not wanting to be dominated by superstition despite demonstrably being dominated by superstition by knocking wood repeatedly. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 344 — Kitty
4 februari 2015 · 1 uur 17 min
Kitty is the guest. She is a rapper/musician whose latest EP, Frostbite, is now available.
RollingStone says
"Love is pain, and nobody understands that quite like this suburban teen-rap every-girl. Pryde went viral with ["Okay Cupid"]...a homemade mumblecore hit, in the voice of a bored kid from Florida. It's full of wit ("It's my party, couldn't cry if I wanted to") and mall-rat ambience, as she waits for her boyfriend's drunk-dials at 3:30 a.m."
And The New York Times says
"She doesn’t rap because it’s funny or novel, but rather because it’s simply the best and most comfortable tool available to her. The results so far, while almost no one has been watching, have the intimacy and comfort of private recordings. They transfix." Lees meerMonologue topics: privilege, mail.
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Episode 343 — Tim Johnston
28 januari 2015 · 1 uur 28 min
Tim Johnston is the guest. His new novel, Descent, is available now from Algonquin Books. It is the official January selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
The Washington Post raves
“I’ve read many variations on this theme, some quite good, but never one as powerful as Tim Johnston’s Descent . . . The story unfolds brilliantly, always surprisingly, but the glory of Descent lies not in its plot but in the quality of the writing. The magic of his prose equals the horror of Johnston’s story; each somehow enhances the other . . . Read this astonishing novel. It’s the best of both worlds.”
And Mary Roach says
“Descent is the best novel I've read in a long time. Unlike most books that fall into the category of Page Turner, this one also falls in the category of Writing So Good You Can't Even Believe It. Johnston has a superhuman gift for watching and listening to the world and rendering, on the page, its beauty and savagery with such detail and power that the story feels almost more like memory than something read. I was so absorbed in the final incredible fifty pages that I missed my flight to La Guardia.”
Monologue topics: Ann Bauer, Salon, writing, writers, money, class, privilege, honesty, The Struggle. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 342 — Alexis Coe
21 januari 2015 · 1 uur 25 min
Alexis Coe is the guest. She is the author of Alice + Freda Forever, available now from Pulp/Zest Books.
Peter Orner says
"Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890's that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here's a real crime of passion. Or was it? 'And so Alice carried the razor around every day in her dress pocket, just in case Freda came to town…' I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down."
And Vol. 1 Brooklyn says
"Though the history recounted in Alexis Coe's Alice + Freda Forever is captivating in its own right, Coe also provides a larger context for it, elevating this to the level of a societal indictment. This story of a star-crossed love with a violent ending at times reads like a microcosm of Memphis at the end of the 19th century. As Coe's narrative delves into perceptions of sexuality and the ways in which the case touched on different aspects of daily life, it never loses sight of the tragic romance at its core."
Monologue topics: mail, Chelsea Hodson, prurience, sex, manners, gender.
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Episode 341 — Cameron Pierce
14 januari 2015 · 1 uur 16 min
Cameron Pierce is the guest. He is the author of several books and the editor of Lazy Fascist Press.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn says
"Whether he's describing a grandmother who gets pulled into a watery grave by an almost mythological fish or telling the creepy story of a creature that wouldn't be out of place in an H.P. Lovecraft story, Pierce constantly pulls together concepts from the outmost edges of outré fiction and the kind of unassumingly profound storytelling that made authors like Flannery O'Connor and George Singleton household names."
And Beach Sloth says
“Black humor has never been darker than this; this is the absolute pitch black of humor."
Monologue topics: war, war on terror, word usage, Charlie Hebdo, terrorism.
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Episode 340 — Chelsea Hodson
7 januari 2015 · 1 uur 13 min
Chelsea Hodson is the guest. Her chapbook entitled Pity the Animal is available now in print from Future Tense Books at Powells.com, and electronically from Emily Books as a Kindle Single.
Tobias Carroll calls it
“One of the best literary works I’ve encountered this year... much of its power comes from the way it juxtaposes seemingly unrelated elements: a retrospective of Marina Abramović’s art, scenes from Hodson’s life, economic musings, and considerations of adventure. The way these eventually coalesce is immeasurably powerful; the accumulated effect is devastating, and hits harder than many works ten times its length.”
And Bitch magazine calls it
"Pointed, scathing, and suspenseful. This critical yet intimate essay is not to be missed."
Monologue topics: leafblowers, chainsaws, suffering. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 339 — Mark Gluth
31 december 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Mark Gluth is the guest. His new novel No Other is available now from Sator Press.
Kate Zambreno says
"In Mark Gluth's beautiful family gothic No Other, the reader encounters a landscape of mood and mystery, burning with a stripped-down pain. Gluth's sentences devastate in their raw economy, attempting to penetrate the everyday, tracing abbreviated existences struggling to survive through bare seasons."
And Blake Butler says
"In clipped, incantatory verse shined from whorls somewhere between Gummo and As I Lay Dying, Mark Gluth's No Other invents new ambient psychological terraforma of rare form, a world by turns humid and eerie, nowhere and now, like a blacklight in a locked room."
Monologue topics: the holidays, Santa, mail, answering questions with questions. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 338 — Luke B. Goebel
24 december 2014 · 1 uur 13 min
Luke B. Goebel is the guest. His new novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, is now available from Fiction Collective Two.
Kirkus Reviews says
“If Kerouac were writing today, his work might look something like this—and despite the title, many of the stories are indeed ours, as they focus on love and loss, pain and yearning.… This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.”
And Lidia Yuknavitch says
"I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on."
Monologue topics: holidays, Santa Claus, lying, shattering my daughter's dream.
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Episode 337 — Lynn Lurie
17 december 2014 · 1 uur 22 min
Lynn Lurie is the guest. Her new novel, Quick Kills, is available now from Etruscan Press.
Kirkus Reviews says
"Prepare to be disturbed by this slim but disquieting novel about the perils of youth and the trespasses committed against a young girl. This second novel by Lurie (Corner of the Dead, 2008) is purposefully vague in its descriptions but nevertheless carries with it a feeling of dread for its unnamed female narrator. As the book opens, she is roughly 13 years old and engaged in an unsuitable relationship with a photographer who tells her that young girls fill canvasses and who takes many, many nude photographs of her. She also has a rough-and-tumble brother, Jake, and a fragile sister, Helen. Their father, a hunter, also seems to represent an omnipresent threat. In one scene, Helen arrives with smeared eyeliner, trailing blood: "As she passes me in the foyer, she says to Mother. I had nothing to do with this. Why don't you ask Daddy?" The mother in question is equally guilty of the crimes of this household, emotionally absent and quick to overlook the obvious damage being done to her daughters. As the narrator indulges her own interests in photographing the world around her, readers should experience these flashes of imagery much as she does—the grotesque and the beautiful, all wrapped up in one another. By the end of the book, it becomes a story of survivor's guilt as the narrator invests her hurt in brief, broken and unwise liaisons. "By having done nothing all these years I didn't protect the others that must have come after me," she admits, in the end. As a bildungsroman, the story is lacking in detail, emotional depth and character arc, but it nevertheless leaves a frightening and lingering restlessness in its wake that may be hard for readers to shake."
Monologue topics: moving, freezing, rain, 24-hr grocery stores, the dirty heart of LA, cosmically significant accidental verbal puns.
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Episode 336 — Michael McGriff & J.M. Tyree
10 december 2014 · 1 uur 13 min
Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree are the guests. Their new story collection, Our Secret Life in the Movies, is now available from A Strange Object.
The Washington Post says
"This beautiful, devastating little book is quite unlike anything else I've ever encountered, and if you grew up in a small town in the 1980s feeling even remotely marginal, it's specifically engineered to break your heart."
And the BBC calls it
"Brilliant."
Monologue topics: the move, exhaustion, the new home studio, schedule changes.
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Episode 335 — Mike Bushnell
3 december 2014 · 1 uur 20 min
Mike Bushnell is the guest. His latest poetry collection is called OHSO, and it's available now from Scrambler Books.
Scott McClanahan says
"OHSO is revolutionary. It has seen death. Mike Bushnell is a ghost of the classics."
And Beach Sloth says
"Mike Bushnell is a tornado of a person. Everything around him gets sucked into his vortex. What comes out are some of the single best lines I have encountered. The energy he possesses with live readings translates extremely well into the written word. OHSO has been a long time a coming but thank goodness it is finally here."
Monologue topics: moving, schedule changes. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 334 — Dmitry Samarov
30 november 2014 · 1 uur 22 min
Dmitry Samarov is the guest. His new memoir, Where To?, is now available from Curbside Splendor.
Rick Kogan calls it
"Funny, touching, observant, philosophical, sad, world-weary, artful and wonderful are the stories that pepper this book. There has never been a cab driver like Dmitry Samarov and, since he's given up for keeps late-night for-hire driving, there never will be."
And Wendy MacNaughton says
"With his gorgeous pen and ink drawings and funny, tragic, and all too true stories, Samarov's chronicle of his adventures as a Chicago taxi driver is by far the best ride you'll ever take in a cab."
Monologue topics: mail, recent episodes.
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Episode 333 — Dorothea Lasky
26 november 2014 · 1 uur 14 min
Dorothea Lasky is the guest. Her latest poetry collection, Rome, is available now from Liveright.
Maggie Nelson says
“Dorothea Lasky is one of the very best poets we've got. Her poems radiate weirdness and raw power; you can feel your mind grow new folds as you read them. They lay waste to milquetoast notions of poetic longing or melancholy, and instead go in for the vibrating, bloody facts of sadness, anger, desire, bare life, all returned to us more intensely, strangely, and sometimes comedically, by her words. The line is Lasky's measure, and she wields it like an axe she's been carrying through several lifetimes, that kind of wisdom. Her Rome is huge and intrepid and perfect, a total gift.”
And Fanny Howe says
“Rome is a trip with the wheels engaged to land at every line ending, then flipped up again. A wholly open-hearted book bringing me back to Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen and the suffragettes. True life.”
Monologue topics: holiday gift ideas, support the show, Dorothea reads a poem.
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Episode 332 — William Giraldi
23 november 2014 · 1 uur 31 min
William Giraldi is the guest. His latest novel, Hold the Dark, is now available from Liveright Publishing.
The New York Times Book Review calls it
“[F]ierce, extraordinary…. Hold the Dark is an unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone awry. It’s all but bereft of levity, spectacularly violent and exquisitely written.”
And the Boston Globe says
“Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s Boston writer William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction… [Hold the Dark] certainly stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership.”
Monologue topics: holiday gift ideas, the holidays, capitalist orgies, bad attitudes.
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Episode 331 — Atticus Lish
19 november 2014 · 1 uur 16 min
Atticus Lish is the guest. His debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, is available now from Tyrant Books. It is the official November selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
The New York Times calls it
“Perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.”
And Joy Williams says
"So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. Preparation for the Next Life is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book."
Monologue topics: TNB Book Club, mail, transcribing this podcast, Dear Sugar, advice.
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Episode 330 — Meghan Daum
16 november 2014 · 1 uur 25 min
Meghan Daum is the guest. Her new essay collection, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, is available now from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Hilton Als says
“I think it’s fair to say that I can’t tell you what Meghan Daum’s remarkable book means to me—the exceptional often denies verbalization. Her diverse subject matter aside—Mom, Joni Mitchell, the fetishization of food—it’s Daum’s galvanizing energy that one finds so attractive; nowhere in her work is there evidence of the ‘trance’ that Virginia Woolf said characterized so many women’s lives. Instead, Daum builds her various worlds out of great presence and imagination, and who wouldn’t want to live in her new city?”
And Geoff Dyer says
“The Unspeakable is a fantastic collection of essays: funny, clever, and moving (often at the same time), never more universal than in its most personal moments (in other words, throughout), and written with enviable subtlety, precision, and spring.”
Monologue topics: mail, dead animals, sleep, naps.
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Episode 329 — Hannah Pittard
12 november 2014 · 1 uur 21 min
Hannah Pittard is the guest. Her new novel is called Reunion, and it is available now from Grand Central Publishing.
Emily St. John Mandel calls it
"A nuanced and intriguing study of family and love, money and debt, failure and success, starring one of the most likeable flawed narrators to come along in some time."
And Publishers Weekly calls it
"Emotionally astute...When this family of sorts gathers in Atlanta for the funeral, there is tension, pain, comedy, and finally, some healing and resolution. Kate is a winning narrator, whose insights into herself and her family keep the pages turning."
Monologue topics: wheat, internet holes, movies, Birdman, Gone Girl.
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Episode 328 — Bich Minh Nguyen
9 november 2014 · 1 uur 24 min
Bich Minh Nguyen is the guest. Her new novel, Pioneer Girl, is available now from Viking.
The San Francisco Chronicle calls it
"[A] sincere and moving novel... a surprising synthesis of the personal and the public, the intimate and the epic, the historical and the fictional. Nguyen takes two disparate strands of our national mythology and weaves them into a powerful and wholly original American saga."
And Kirkus Reviews says
"Nguyen has a perceptive understanding of the tension between mothers and daughters and the troubling insights to be gained from digging into the past. An unexpected pleasure, with a well-drawn and compelling narrator."
Monologue topics: Las Vegas, pot, gambling, losing, winning, ethics.
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327. Frederick Barthelme
5 november 2014 · 1 uur 21 min
Frederick Barthelme is the guest. His latest novel, There Must Be Some Mistake, is available now from Little, Brown & Co.
David Shields says "Very nearly alone among his peers, Frederick Barthelme has, over the last thirty-five years, written fiction about what it actually feels like to live in contemporary post-religious, hyper-mediated America. And—even more of a rarity—he works hard to find a way to somehow tolerate/celebrate, with enormous subtlety and without an ounce of sentimentality, our bare-bones existence. In There Must Be Some Mistake, Barthelme has distilled his brutal, crucial vision into useable essence." And Publishers Weekly says "Barthelme, a master of minimalist suburbia-set fiction, returns with a buoyantly offbeat murder tale that doubles as a meditation on everything from contemporary art to Google to mortality... Throughout the novel, his narration provides punchy, wry commentary on the banality of pop culture, but the tone is, ultimately, infectiously optimistic."
Monologue topics: mail, food, animal rights, Sarah Gerard, not voting, apathy, George Carlin.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
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Episode 326 — Elizabeth McCracken
2 november 2014 · 1 uur 25 min
Elizabeth McCracken is the guest. Her latest book is a story collection called Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and it is available now from The Dial Press.
The New York Times Book Review says
“Elizabeth McCracken knows how loss can melt reality, forever altering a person’s sense of time....In her new collection, McCracken gives brilliantly splintered life to just that kind of story....The fact that there is nothing depressing about the ubiquity of accident and disaster in Thunderstruck & Other Stories is a powerful testament to the scratchy humor and warm intelligence of McCracken’s writing....Her wisdom and wit have a moral dimension that deepens our sympathy for her straying souls.... [A] restorative, unforgettable collection.”
And Nick Hornby says
“Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favorite writers. Or, to put it another way: I’ve read everything she’s written...and there’s nothing I haven’t liked and admired enormously...She writes with acuity, soul, and a kind of easy grace that probably kills her, about characters she has created to love.... Thunderstruck showcases all the things this remarkable writer is so good at: the eccentric but illuminating metaphors, the deft characterization, the heart-lurching narrative development, the tenderness, the fantastic aphorisms....Anything new by her is an excuse for wild, drunken celebration.”
Monologue topics: mail, Christianity, Jesus, God, confusion. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 325 — Sarah Gerard
29 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 19 min
Sarah Gerard is the guest. Her debut novel, Binary Star, is due out from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015.
Kate Zambreno says Lees meer"I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it."
And Jenny Offill calls it
"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way."
Monologue topics: Legoland, fear, masks, chaos, exhaustion, fire alarms, meth, cops, neighbors, pandemonium.
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Episode 324 — Lin Enger
26 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 12 min
Lin Enger is the guest. His new novel, The High Divide, is available now from Algonquin Books. It is the official October selection of The TNB Book Club.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls it Lees meer"[A] masterfully told Western reinvention of Homer’s Odyssey...Set against a backdrop of beauty and danger, this is the moving story of a man coming to terms with his past. In its narrative simplicity and emotional directness, it is reminiscent of John Ford’s classic The Searchers."
And Library Journal, in a starred review, says
"Moving through the High Divide--'the rough country between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers'--even as its characters move through important divides, or turning points, of their own, Enger's novel is told in beautifully exact, liquid language that wastes no time, just as one cannot afford to waste time when making a journey such as the Pope family's. Highly recommended."
Monologue topics: exhaustion, going to the doctor, Legoland, fear, loathing.
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Episode 323 — Diane Cook
22 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 22 min
Diane Cook is the guest. Her debut story collection, Man V. Nature, is available now from Harper Books.
Tea Obreht says
"Man V. Nature is as close to experiencing a Picasso as literature can get: the worlds in Diane Cook’s impressive debut are bizarre, vertiginous, funny, pushed to the extreme-but just familiar enough in their nuances of the human condition to evoke an irresistible, around-the-corner reality.”
And the Boston Globe says
“Here’s a good rule: If Diane Cook wrote it, read it…Safety is tenuous, if not an illusion, in her thoughtful, unsettling, and darkly funny collection.”
Monologue topics: Kathleen Hale, Blythe Harris, don't feed trolls, Goodreads, stalking.
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Episode 322 — Celeste Ng
19 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Celeste Ng is the guest. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, is now available from Penguin.
The New York Times Book Review says
"If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now… Ng has set two tasks in this novel’s doubled heart—to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of secrets the family members won’t share… What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind—a burden you do not always survive."
And the LA Times calls it
"[A]n accomplished debut... It's also heart-wrenching. Ng deftly pulls together the strands of this complex, multigenerational novel. Everything I Never Told You is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together — and that finally end up tearing it apart."
Monologue topics: Halloween, costume parties, ebola, comedy, missed opportunities.
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Episode 321 — Mira Jacob
15 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Mira Jacob is the guest. Her debut novel, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, is now available from Random House.
Kirkus, in a starred review, says
"Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; Lahiri may be more overtly profound, Jacob more willing to go for comedy, but both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.”
And the Boston Globe calls it
“Beautifully wrought, frequently funny, gently heartbreaking . . . Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts. When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things.”
Monologue topics: mail, scripts, the emotional demands this podcast places on me, outtakes, ebola, The Fear, end times, zombie apocalypse. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 320 — Tod Goldberg
12 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Tod Goldberg is the guest. His new novel Gangsterland is now available from Counterpoint Press.
Kirkus, in a starred review, says
“Clearly influenced by the great Elmore Leonard, Goldberg puts his own dry comic spin on the material…Clever plotting, a colorful cast of characters, and priceless situations make this comedic crime novel an instant classic.”
And Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, says
"Goldberg injects Talmudic wisdom and a hint of Springsteen into the workings of organized crime and FBI investigative techniques and makes it all work splendidly."
Monologue topics: bothersome phrases, I wish there was something I could do.
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Episode 319 — Steph Cha
8 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Steph Cha is the guest. Her new novel, Beware Beware, is available now from Minotaur Books.
The Los Angeles Times says
“Before this cautionary tale is over, secrets will be revealed, lies within lies told, more people injured or killed and Song's core values compromised in ways that will have psychological reverberations for years, and books, to come. Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler would be proud.”
And Publishers Weekly says
“Engaging… Song soon becomes caught in a complex plot involving deception, betrayal, and revenge. Cha follows noir conventions, with Daphne as femme fatale and Song forced into morally ambiguous choices, but she also offers a plucky heroine, warm secondary characters, and a vivid portrait of L.A.’s Koreatown.”
Monologue topics: mail, the monologue to Episode 318.
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Episode 318 — Merritt Tierce
5 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 22 min
Merritt Tierce is the guest. Her debut novel Love Me Back is now available from Doubleday.
The Oxford American says
“What’s so compelling about this compulsively readable yet highly literary novel is not the 'unflinching' depiction of Marie’s behavior—though it’s crafted so carefully that readers want to consume each detail—but instead the beautifully plain and unsentimental access Tierce gives us to her protagonist’s interior…How rare it is to find a writer who can encapsulate a character’s sweeping motivation in a page or paragraph or single sentence…Tierce’s magnetic portrayal of a woman whose behavior is conventionally allowed only of men announces Tierce as a writer we’ve been waiting for for much too long."
And Carrie Brownstein says
“Tierce's prose possesses the force, bluntness and surprise of a sucker punch. Love Me Back is an unflinching and galvanic novel full of heart and heartache; one of my favorite books of the last few years.”
Monologue topics: the darkness of the past week, literary media, Ed Champion, Stephen Tully Dierks, Tao Lin, Emily Gould, Porochista Khakpour, Twitter, ambivalence, flailing.
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Episode 317 — Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, & Leanne Shapton
1 oktober 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton are the guests. They are the editors of the bestselling book Women in Clothes, which features the work of more than 600 authors, including notables like Cindy Sherman, Lena Dunham, Kim Gordon, and Molly Ringwald. Kirkus Reviews says “Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries—all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal, to show the connection between dress and ‘habits of mind,’ and to offer readers ‘a new way of interpreting their outsides.’ ‘What are my values?’ one woman asks. ‘What do I want to express?’ Those questions inform the multitude of eclectic responses gathered in this delightfully idiosyncratic book.” And Publishers Weekly says “Thoughtfully crafted and visually entertaining, this collection, edited by Heti, Julavits, and Shapton, uses personal reflections from 642 contributors to examine women’s relationship with clothes in a deceptively lighthearted and irreverent tone….it also inspires meaningful questions…the prose is spliced with striking visuals…[a] provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood.” Monologue topics: nerves, confusion, technology, not talking about literary scandal.
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Episode 316 — Sarah McCarry
28 september 2014 · 1 uur 31 min
Sarah McCarry is the guest. She is the author of several books, and her next novel, About a Girl, is due out from St. Martin's Griffin in the summer of 2015.
Bennett Madison says
"Sarah McCarry's strange and gorgeous punk fairytales make magic accessible and imbue the everyday with the weight of myth."
And Erica Lorraine Scheidt says
"Sarah McCarry is the patron saint of girls on the edge."
Monologue topics: Derek Jeter, envy, confusion, Clay Shirky, Amazon, Big 5 publishers, not knowing what I think about anything, mail.
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Episode 315 — Courtney Moreno
24 september 2014 · 1 uur 21 min
Courtney Moreno is the guest. Her debut novel, In Case of Emergency, is available now from McSweeney's.
Kirkus Reviews says
"In this emotionally moving, well-written, engaging novel, Moreno strikes a profound balance between the clinical logic of trauma and the personal irrationality of a young woman dealing with her demons."
And The Huffington Post says
"Reminiscent of Leslie Jamison's essay on medical acting in her collection The Empathy Exams, Courtney Moreno's book uses the coping mechanisms she learned while working as an EMT to color her narrator's painful past. Moreno confronts both physical and psychological trauma, expertly blurring the lines between the two."
Monologue topics: bad news, not voting, bad attitude, mail, leotarded. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 314 — Laila Lalami
21 september 2014 · 1 uur 13 min
Laila Lalami is the guest. Her new novel, The Moor's Account, is available now from Pantheon.
Salman Rushdie says Lees meer"Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth."
And Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it
"Assured, lyrical . . . Certainly the most extensive telling of the tale from ‘the Moor’s’ point of view . . . Adding a new spin to a familiar story, Lalami offers an utterly believable, entertainingly told alternative to the historical record. A delight."
Monologue topics: mail, Jim Morrison, my friend pain.
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Episode 313 — Eric Obenauf
17 september 2014 · 1 uur 20 min
Eric Obenauf is the guest. He is the co-founder and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio, an independent press based in Columbus, Ohio.
Full Stop says Lees meer"[Two Dollar Radio books] are ambitious, far-reaching, and even visionary."
And the Virginia Quarterly Review says
"Two Dollar Radio, a relatively new indie making a big splash, made an even bigger splash when it announced the launch of Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures, a 'micro-budget film division.' These aren’t book trailers; they aren’t done just to promote their titles, or even their brand. These are creative, exciting works of art in their own right; each one gives you the sense that the people behind it are incredibly creative people who love books, but who also love movies, and love making things, making things happen, trying something new. It sounds so simple, but it really was a paradigm shift for Two Dollar Radio to even think this was a possibility."
Monologue topics: mail, reactions to Episode 312, how to download episodes of this show online.
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Episode 312 — Wendy C. Ortiz
14 september 2014 · 1 uur 26 min
Wendy C. Ortiz is the guest. Her memoir, Excavation, is now available from Future Tense Books. It is the official September selection of the TNB Book Club. (Photo: Francine Orr/ LA Times) Lidia Yuknavitch says Lees meer
The time has finally arrived when women are telling the truth--the hard truths, the messy, glorious, loud, tender, screeching corporeal truths--about their lives as they live them and not lived as we are asked to live them. Wendy C. Ortiz's writing will rearrange your DNA. Permanently, beautifully...
And Emily Rapp says
Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz will change your life. Readers will find everything here: a gripping and necessary story, luminous writing and an utterly compelling heroine who is both generous and fierce. You will emerge changed, dazzled, energized, disbelieving and yet a believer. Most of all, read this book because, like all great literature, and especially the best memoirs, it will make you feel more alive.
Monologue topics: mail, the word "retarded," podcast criticism, narcissism, too much me.
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Episode 311 — Patrick Hoffman
10 september 2014 · 1 uur 18 min
Patrick Hoffman is the guest. His debut novel The White Van is now available from Grove/Atlantic.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, says
"A heist propels Hoffman’s outstanding first novel. Sophia, a Russian émigré, plans to rob a San Francisco branch of US Bank with some inside assistance from its manager, Rada Harkov, and the help of two people recruited (decidedly against their wills) for the job: “the Russian,” another émigré and a black-market trader who owes Sophia money; and Emily, a young woman coerced into helping with drugs and threats (“She had been made into a slave”). The robbery nets some $880,000, a powerful temptation for another major character, Elias, an officer with the SFPD Gang Task Force. An alcoholic, Elias is plagued by money worries. Beyond the engaging plot, the book focuses on people’s behavior in the face of impossible choices. Hoffman, who spent nine years working as a PI in San Francisco, writes with great authority about the city’s seamy side and the grim realities of life for its down-on-their-luck denizens."
Monologue topics: Apple, technology fetishization, camping outside of stores, Ray Rice, public outrage. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 310 — Amy Lawless
7 september 2014 · 1 uur 19 min
Amy Lawless is the guest. Her latest poetry collection, My Dead, is available now from Octopus Books.
Janae Green says
"Lawless writes poetry that itches; you have to bury your fingernails into your skin and bleed a little to remind yourself not to scratch it."
And Interview magazine says
"My Dead delves into the process of mourning loved ones with Lawless' calm, characteristically non-melodramatic poise. She cites videos of elephant mourning rituals seen on the Internet as a main source of inspiration. While humor might have been used to subvert heavier topics in the past, she chooses control and intimate dissection this time around."
Monologue topics: unlived lives, mediocrity, fate, bifurcation, Joan Rivers. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 309 — David Connerley Nahm
3 september 2014 · 1 uur 12 min
David Connerley Nahm is the guest. His debut novel, Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky, is available now from Two Dollar Radio.
Library Journal calls it
"A powerful first novel, the kind that makes you want to stop people in the street to tell them about it."
And NPR says
"Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is far from a conventional novel...The pacing is perfect -- while this isn't a thriller, at least in any traditional sense of the word, it's deeply suspenseful...it's impossible to stop reading until you've gone through each beautiful line, a beauty that infuses the whole novel, even in its darkest moments."
Monologue topics: dinosaurs, weirdness, weather, vacation, lethargy, rest, impatience. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices