Otherppl with Brad Listi | Books & Culture
Alle afleveringen
1.363 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Episode 258 — Willy Vlautin
9 maart 2014 · 1 uur 28 min
Willy Vlautin is the guest. His new novel The Free is now available from Harper Perennial. It is the official March selection of The TNB Book Club.
Cheryl Strayed says
“Willy Vlautin writes novels about people all alone in the wind. His prose is direct and complex in its simplicity, and his stories are sturdy and bighearted and full of lives so shattered they shimmer.”
And George Pelecanos says
“The Free is another outstanding book from one of America’s most underappreciated artists.”
Monologue topics: Richmond Fontaine, singing, mail, friendship, new lows for the program, the AWP episode.
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Episode 257 — Natalie Baszile
5 maart 2014 · 1 uur 18 min
Natalie Baszile is the guest. Her debut novel, Queen Sugar, is now available from Pamela Dorman Books.
O Magazine says
“In Queen Sugar, two bulwarks of American literature—Southern fiction and the transformational journey—are given a fresh take by talented first time novelist Natalie Baszile . . . [the novel] is a sensory experience, a tableau vivant that Baszile skillfully paints in a palette simultaneously subtle and bold. Queen Sugar is a bright and enticing reminder that, sometimes, you can go home.”
And Joshilyn Jackson, the NY Times bestselling author of Gods in Alabama, says
“Queen Sugar is a gorgeous, moving story about what grounds us as brothers and sisters, as mothers and daughters, and all the ways we fight to save each other. Natalie Baszile’s characters put brave roots into inhospitable ground, looking for a place, a person, a community to call home home. I alternately laughed and wept as they failed each other, forgave each other, lost each other, found themselves. It’s a wise, strong book, and I loved it. You will, too.”
Monologue topics: The Oscars, darkness, fear, self-loathing
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Episode 256 — Adrianne Harun
2 maart 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Adrianne Harun is the guest. Her new novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, is now available from Penguin.
Jess Walter calls it
“Mythical, magical, and chillingly real…Adrianne Harun’s writing can hold you breathless.”
And Library Journal raves
“Harun’s mastery clearly lies in establishing atmosphere and mood. Much as it does to the novel’s characters, the gothic ambiance wraps around the reader and won’t let go. Laced with local color, this debut will please fans of the macabre.”
Monologue topics: AWP 2014, negative reviews, literary criticism.
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AWP 2014 Special — Live at The HTMLGIANT House
1 maart 2014 · 43 min
This special episode of the podcast was recorded spur-of-the-moment on the afternoon of February 28, 2014. I had the chance to talk with some folks at The HTMLGIANT House who are up in Seattle for AWP. (The 'house' in question is the house that HTMLGIANT rented for the festivities.)
Mira Gonzalez. Spencer Madsen. Gene Morgan. Some guys named Gabe and Patrick who were sitting in a hot tub.
Hear it all, now, raw and uncut.
Raw and uncut. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 255 — Kelcey Parker
26 februari 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Kelcey Parker is the guest. Her new novella, Liliane's Balcony: A Novella of Fallingwater, is now available from Rose Metal Press.
Booklist says
"The latest from Parker is an inventive novella hybrid, a mix of prose and poetry, past and present, heartbreak and humor. At the core is Liliane Kaufmann, the wife and first cousin of the philandering Edgar Kaufmann, who commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to create the audacious Fallingwater, a Pennsylvania house built over a waterfall. Rippling out from the couple is a cast of characters spanning centuries. Without introduction or background, a different voice narrates each chapter as the iconic home itself becomes a central character. Interspersing fiction with fact (although fact outweighs fiction in this well-researched story), Parker reveals the tragic life of strong, intelligent Liliane, who is slowly eroded by a complicated marriage gone toxic. Adding dimension to her portrayal are three other women, all at different points of self-discovery, all potentially bound for a similar fate as Liliane. Not unlike Fallingwater’s structure, which masterfully balances the man-made with the natural, Parker sculpts and controls myriad, nearly unwieldy elements to construct a driven plot that illuminates the perched house and those who live within it."
Monologue topics: mail, my long creative struggle, creativity identity, showing your work. Lees meerLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Episode 254 — Randa Jarrar
23 februari 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Randa Jarrar is the guest. Her debut novel, A Map of Home, is now available from Penguin.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, raves
Jarrar's sparkling debut about an audacious Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt and Texas is intimate, perceptive and very, very funny. Nidali Ammar is born in Boston to a Greek-Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father, and moves to Kuwait at a very young age, staying there until she's 13, when Iraq invades. A younger brother is born in Kuwait, rounding out a family of complex citizenships. During the occupation, the family flees to Alexandria in a wacky caravan, bribing soldiers along the way with whiskey and silk ties. But they don't stay long in Egypt, and after the war, Nidali's father finds work in Texas. At first, Nidali is disappointed to learn that feeling rootless doesn't make her an outsider in the States, and soon it turns out the precocious and endearing Arab chick isn't very different from other American girls, a reality that only her father may find difficult to accept. Jarrar explores familiar adolescent ground—stifling parental expectations, precarious friendships, sensuality and first love—but her exhilarating voice and flawless timing make this a standout.
Monologue topics: being in a rush, technology, my brain, teaching my daughter about music, Freddy Mercury, Billy Idol.
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Episode 253 — Spencer Madsen
19 februari 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Spencer Madsen is the guest. He is the founder of Sorry House, an independent press based in Brooklyn, and his new book of poetry, You Can Make Anything Sad, is due out from Publishing Genius Press in April.
Dennis Cooper raves Lees meer"When I read Spencer Madsen’s poetry, I not only feel awe because he’s so good, one of the best, but I also think about how everything in the world is happening at the same time, and how the world we get to know is so heavily edited down. It’s the hugest, weirdest feeling. I wish Spencer Madsen could be everywhere at once. I really love You Can Make Anything Sad.”
Monologue topics: Mira Gonzalez, mail, misophonia, change of location.
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Episode 252 — Nina McConigley
16 februari 2014 · 1 uur 16 min
Nina McConigley is the guest. Her debut story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, is now available from FiveChapters Books.
Antonya Nelson says
“What I love about this collection of stories is its wit and warmth. McConigley’s characters are “the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming,” and their struggles as exoticized and denigrated community members could be, in a less interesting writer’s hands, yet another scolding tract on America’s guilty conscience. Instead, this book celebrates human pluck and humor, a new sensibility for a new time, when everyone is both at home and utterly alien in the contemporary American west. A terrific read.”
And Eleanor Henderson raves
“Nina McConigley crafts out of the Wyoming landscape a West few readers have known before–a place where, when you don’t look like everyone else, there aren’t many places to hide. And yet anyone who has ever felt a complicated kind of love for home, country, and family will find pleasure and wisdom in these stunning stories.”
Monologue topics: Valentine's Day, hatred of holidays, Presidents Day, love.
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Episode 251 — Aubrey Hirsch
12 februari 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Aubrey Hirsch is the guest. Her story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, is now available from Braddock Avenue Books.
Matt Bell says
"In Why We Never Talk About Sugar, Aubrey Hirsch posits an uncertain world, offering us her characters at their most confused, frightened, obsessed. As protection against their troubles, these men and women cling often to science, and also to story and if these two ways of seeing cannot always save them, then still they might provide some comfort, some necessary and sustaining faith, the mechanisms of what greatest mysteries might await us all, when all else is stripped away."
And Roxane Gay says
"Aubrey Hirsch is a bright shining star of a writer and the stories in her flawless debut collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, are a little disturbing and a little strange and a little sweet but always a lot to hold on to. Hirsch shows us the charm of her imagination and how carefully she will break your heart. This is a book you will keep coming back to, the one you won t be able to stop talking about because it's that damn good."
Monologue topics: mail, congratulating myself, Elizabeth Ellen, Fast Machine
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Episode 250 — Chris Parris-Lamb
9 februari 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Chris Parris-Lamb is the guest. He is a literary agent at The Gernert Company in New York City. His clients include Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) and Garth Risk Hallberg (City on Fire).
The New York Observer says Lees meer"Mr. Parris-Lamb has managed over the past year to sell a tall stack of books by first-time authors, some of them for money that would please even the most seasoned veterans."
Also on this episode: A segment of my conversation with Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men (Algonquin Books), the official February selection of The TNB Book Club. To hear the full hour with Gina, simply click here and sign up for Other People Premium.
Monologue topics: insomnia, TED Talks, anger, disgust, tweets.
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Premium: Gina Frangello
6 februari 2014 · 1 uur
Gina Frangello is the guest. Her new novel, A Life in Men, is the official February selection of The TNB Book Club. It is available now from Algonquin Books.
Booklist raves Lees meer“In this bravura performance, a quantum creative leap...Frangello astutely dissects the quandaries of female sexuality, adoption, terminal illness, and compound heartbreak in a torrent of tough-minded observations, audacious candor, and storytelling moxie.”
And Emily Rapp says
“Gina Frangello’s luminous novel is deeply human, darkly funny, seriously sexy; it brims with artistry and intelligence and heart...Frangello illuminates the ways in which life itself is an illusion, but a grand and beautiful and heartbreaking and brilliant one.”
***Note: This is a Premium episode. It is available for Premium subscribers only.
Please sign up for Premium. It costs $2. That's it. Two bucks a month. (Or else you can pay $4.99 for six months of access, or $8.99 for a year.)
You do that, you can listen to Gina's episode—plus you'll have access to the podcast's complete archives. Every single show.
You can listen online here, or else you can listen while on the go via the free, official Other People app, available now for your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android device.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
-BL
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Episode 249 — Kyle Minor
5 februari 2014 · 1 uur 21 min
Kyle Minor is the guest. His new story collection, Praying Drunk, is now available from Sarabande Books.
Publishers Weekly raves Lees meer"Similar to a great magic trick, the 13 stories in Minor's latest lure reader investment with strong visuals while simultaneously pulling the rug out from underfoot with clever, literary sleights-of-hand. Though not necessarily linked in the traditional sense, there is a sequential order to the collection--ideas, locations, incidents, and characters echo as the volume chugs forward--and the result is an often dazzling, emotional, funny, captivating puzzle."
And Kirkus, in a starred review, says
“An award-winning short fiction author offers twelve stories so ripe with realism as to suggest a roman à clef. . . . This brilliant collection unfolds around a fractured narrative of faith and friends and family, loved and lost.”
Monologue topics: mail, co-branding, the inevitability of co-branding, Katy Perry, Rihanna, the virtue of unskillful co-branding.
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Episode 248 — Bill Cotter
2 februari 2014 · 1 uur 17 min
Bill Cotter is the guest. His new novel, The Parallel Apartments, is now available from McSweeney's.
Heidi Julavits says Lees meer"Reading Bill Cotter's The Parallel Apartments is like taking some kind of word drug, but a new one, synthesized in a desert lab from molecules of Lipsyte, Dickens, Pynchon, Williams, Chabon, DeWitt, and Joyce, and then spun together with Cotter's own unique particles to yield a book that produces an actual high when read. There's micro-attention paid to sweatpants material and the feel of artificial cheese powder on fingertips and the bouillon smell of nether regions. There is sadness. There is loneliness. There are riffs that make me wish an actor were there to read to me aloud, so I could cry from laughter without needing to clearly see the page. This book is an experience—it is a never-read-anything-like-it-before work of brainy, heartfelt joy."
And Texas Monthly calls it
"Funny and profane and more than slightly unhinged."
Monologue topics: Super Bowl, barbarism, 1970s sitcoms, audio gags, the app.
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Episode 247 — Matthew Specktor
29 januari 2014 · 1 uur 24 min
Matthew Specktor is the guest. His novel, American Dream Machine, is now available from Tin House.
Mona Simpson says Lees meer"Joan Didion prophesied this novel. In an essay called 'Los Angeles Days,' published in 1992 in After Henry, she wrote that 'Californians until recently spoke of the United States beyond Colorado as 'back east'. If they went to New York, they went 'back' to New York, a way of speaking that carried with it the suggestion of living on a distant frontier. Calfiornians of my daughter's generation speak of going 'Out' to New York, a meaningful shift in the perception of one's place in the world.' Specktor's American Dream Machine may be first literature I've read in which Los Angeles is assumed as London is assumed by Dickens and Paris by Proust and New York by a host of twentieth century American writers. There is nothing ironic, ambivalent, or apologetic about Specktor's relationship to Los Angeles—as it is and was, as myth and as a thriving capitol city. Los Angeles provides an animate pulse under the lives of these men and boys, a source of permanence that lends their struggles gravity and monument."
And David Shields raves
"American Dream Machine is the definitive new Hollywood novel. The tone, the pace, the details—everything is just amazingly right. The whole book is charged with the kind of necessity I almost never see in novels anymore. Thrilling."
Monologue topics: being boring, doing things, my neighborhood, my neighbors, Jamon, listener voicemail.
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Episode 246 — Michael J. Seidlinger
26 januari 2014 · 1 uur 14 min
Michael J. Seidlinger is the guest. He is the book reviews editor for Electric Literature and the founder of an independent press called Civil Coping Mechanisms. His latest novel is The Laughter of Strangers, and it is available now from Lazy Fascist Press.
The Los Angeles Times says Lees meer"The Laughter of Strangers delivers a combination of psychological horror and strangeness that would not be out of place in a David Lynch film. Seidlinger's weird new fight fiction suggests that perhaps the best place for boxing contests isn't in the ring but between the pages of a book."
And Flavorwire raves
"Michael J. Seidlinger has given us the boxing novel of the year. The Laughter of Strangers is a tough and gritty book that will challenge you page after page, but it is oh so worth it."
Monologue topics: psychological paralysis after reading, chaos, illusion, confusion.
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Episode 245 — Rachel Cantor
22 januari 2014 · 1 uur 19 min
Rachel Cantor is the guest. Her debut novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario, Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World.
Library Journal says Lees meer"Cantor’s novel will be a great hit for fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. There’s a lot going on here, and all of it is amusing."
And Jim Crace says
“It’s as if Kurt Vonnegut and Italo Calvino collaborated to write a comic book sci-fi adventure and persuaded Chagall to do the drawings. One of the freshest and mostly lively novels I have encountered for quite a while.”
Monologue topics: Paris, The Lost Generation, having A Moment, getting huge, Bob Dylan, hindsight, ego.
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Episode 244 — Hilton Als
19 januari 2014 · 1 uur 14 min
Hilton Als is the guest. His latest book, White Girls, is now available from McSweeney's—and it has just been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
Junot Díaz raves
"I read Als not only because he is utterly extraordinary, which he is, but for the reason one is often drawn to the best writers—because one has a sense that one’s life might depend on them. White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year."
And John Jeremiah Sullivan says
"Hilton Als’s White Girls...is a leap forward not merely for Als as a writer but for the peculiar American genre of culture-crit-as-autobiography. Its bravery lies in a set refusal to allow itself all sorts of illusions—about race, about sex, about American art—and the subtlety of its thinking is wedded maypole-fashion to a real confessional lyricism [...] Als taught me that I have a lot of white girl in me, too, and so does he. And so do you, is where it gets interesting. If you think that sounds like another blurb-job or post-postmodern twaddle, I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged."
Monologue topics: drought, fire, climate change, the (likely) dystopian future, Finland.
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Premium: Gloria Harrison
16 januari 2014 · 1 uur 20 min
Gloria Harrison is the guest. She is a writer and a longtime contributor to The Nervous Breakdown, and in May of 2013 she was featured on This American Life, Episode 494. ***Note: This is a Premium episode. It is available for Premium subscribers only. Please sign up for Premium. It costs $2. That's it. Two bucks a month. (Or else you can pay $4.99 for six months of access, or $8.99 for a year.) You do that, you can listen to Gloria's episode—plus you'll have access to the podcast's complete archives. Every single show. You can listen online here, or else you can listen while on the go via the free, official Other People app, available now for your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android device. Okay? Okay. Thanks for listening, everybody. -BL
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Episode 243 — Jennifer Percy
15 januari 2014 · 1 uur 23 min
Jennifer Percy is the guest. Her new book, Demon Camp, is available from Scribner. It is the official January selection of The TNB Book Club.
Dexter Filkins, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, calls it Lees meer“...a tale so extraordinary that at times it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds it’s not just Caleb Daniels that comes into focus, but America, too. Jennifer Percy has orchestrated a great narrative about redemption, loss and hope.”
And Esquire magazine calls it
“A powerful debut and a haunting portrait of PTSD, and the effects of war on the psyches of the soldiers who fight and the extreme lengths they'll go to to find relief and heal."
Monologue topics: war, peace, humanity, pacifism, confusion.
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Episode 242 — Mary Miller
12 januari 2014 · 1 uur 19 min
Mary Miller is the guest. Her debut novel, The Last Days of California, is available from Liveright.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, raves Lees meer“Beyond the well-crafted coming-of-age narrative, Miller gets every little detail about the South—from the way the sky greens before a storm to gas stations where Hank Williams Jr.’s 'Family Tradition' blares—just right. But it’s Jess’s earnest, searching voice, as she contemplates her parents, the trip, and their values, that lingers after Miller’s story has finished. In Jess, Miller has created a narrator worthy of comparison with those of contemporaries such as Karen Thompson Walker and of greats such as Carson McCullers.”
And Alexis Smith says
“The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture.”
Monologue topics: photos, concretizing the experience for me, where you are, notecards, ventilating my anguish.
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Episode 241 — Elisa Gabbert
8 januari 2014 · 1 uur 18 min
Elisa Gabbert is the guest. Her new book, The Self Unstable, is now available from Black Ocean.
Teju Cole, writing for The New Yorker, says Lees meer"I found Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable a wonderful surprise. It was the most intelligent and most intriguing thing I’ve read in a while, moving between lyric poetry, aphorism, and memoir, and with thoughts worth stealing on just about every page.”
And Make Magazine says
"Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise."
Monologue topics: the insufferably stupid anti-sunglasses stance of my early twenties, squinting.
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Episode 240 — Ravi Mangla
5 januari 2014 · 1 uur 13 min
Ravi Mangla is the guest. His new novella, Understudies, is now available from Outpost 19.
Laura van den Berg raves Lees meer"Ravi Mangla's Understudies is a brilliant meditation on the private cost of celebrity, the longing to transcend the ordinary, and the seductive nature of performance. Darkly funny, sharply-observed, and terrifically moving, Understudies is an essential debut."
And Gary Lutz says
"Ravi Mangla's delightingly tight, micro-chaptered Understudies is an unassumingly beautiful and moving debut. It's elegantly and hilariously precise about everything it touches, and it touches almost everything human."
Monologue topics: repetition, rhyming, making beats, stuff, my annual purge.
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Episode 239 — James Scott
1 januari 2014 · 1 uur 22 min
James Scott is the guest. His debut novel, The Kept, is available from Harper.
Kirkus, in a starred review, says Lees meer“Scott is both compassionate moralist and master storyteller in this outstanding debut.”
And Tom Perrotta says
“The Kept starts out as a straightforward revenge narrative, then slowly deepens into something much more mysterious and compelling. James Scott has written a riveting and memorable debut novel.”
Monologue topics: New Year's, mail, iTunes reviews.
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Episode 238 — Jennifer Michael Hecht
29 december 2013 · 1 uur 19 min
[Note: I've decided to make this episode available without subscription so that people can listen to it and share it as easily as possible. -BL]
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the guest. Her new book is called Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. It is available now from Yale University Press.
Billy Collins says Lees meer“The title of this book is an imperative against the departure that is suicide, and its contents provide a learned, illuminating look at the history of what is perhaps the darkest secret in all of human behavior.”
And Newsweek says
"That it's not all a drag and you might as well get on with life's vagaries is the strikingly simple and convincing argument of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. . . . While not insensitive to people who use suicide as a way to end the suffering of terminal illness, Hecht brands suicide an immoral act that robs society — and the self-killer — of a life that is certainly more valuable than what it may seem in that dark moment. It solves nothing, complicates everything. . . . Her argument is that it — whatever dark truth that pronoun signifies — almost always gets better."
Monologue topics: Ned Vizzini, suicide, grief.
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Episode 237 — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
25 december 2013 · 1 uur 14 min
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the guest. Her new memoir, The End of San Francisco, is now available from City Lights Books.
Kirkus calls it Lees meer"A blisteringly honest portrait of a young, fast and greatly misunderstood life. . . . An outspoken, gender-ambiguous author and activist reflects on her halcyon days as a wild child in San Francisco."
And The San Francisco Chronicle says
"It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism -- Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation -- and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration."
Monologue topics: my awkwardness, the over-analysis of my awkwardness, preemptive crucifixion, Pontius Pilate-ing.
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Episode 236 — Olivia Laing
22 december 2013 · 1 uur 18 min
Olivia Laing is the guest. Her new book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, is available from Picador.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, says Lees meer“The tortured relationship between literary lions and their liquor illuminates the obscure terrain of psychology and art in this searching biographical medidation....Laing's astute analysis of the pervasive presence and meaning of drink in the writers' texts, and its reflection of the writers' struggle to shape—and escape—reality...A fine study of human frailty through the eyes of its most perceptive victims.”
And Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, says
“I’m sorry I’ve finished this wonderful book because I feel I’ve been talking to a wise friend. I’ve been trying to work out exactly how Olivia Laing drew me in, because I hardly drink myself and have no particular attachment to the group of writers whose trials she describes. I think the tone is beautifully modulated, knowledgeable yet intimate, and she can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape....I think this is a book for all writers or would-be writers, whether succeeding or failing, whether standing on their feet or flat on the pavement....It’s one of the best books I’ve read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring.”
Monologue topics: Twitter, HTML Giant, The Zambreno Doll controversy, Disney on Ice.
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Ned Vizzini, 1981—2013
20 december 2013 · 1 uur 34 min
This is my conversation with Ned, which first aired on December 16, 2012. I wanted to make it available to those who love him and those who love his work. (Prior to today, it was only available via premium subscription, because it was in the deeper archives.)
My heart goes out to all who feel this loss, especially his family.
-BL
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Episode 235 — Joyelle McSweeney
18 december 2013 · 1 uur 16 min
Joyelle McSweeney is the guest. Her books include the poetry collection The Red Bird, and the novels Nylund, the Sarcographer and Flet. Recently, her play entitled Dead Youth, or, The Leaks won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights. She is also a co-editor of Action Books and the quarterly online literary journal Action Yes.
Kate Bernheimer says Lees meer"If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he'd read her Nylund, The Sarcographer one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey. Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney."
And Michael Martone says
"You thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use."
Monologue topics: Christmas, late capitalism, edginess, curmudgeonly behavior, my daughter.
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Episode 234 — Jonathan Miles
15 december 2013 · 1 uur 30 min
Jonathan Miles is the guest. His new novel, Want Not, is now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dave Eggers, writing for The New York Times Book Review, says Lees meer"I loved this book…the work of a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer…it’s a joyous book, a very funny book, and an unpredictable book, and that’s because everyone in it is allowed to be fully human.”
And Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, says
"In this powerful, blisteringly funny novel, Jonathan Miles makes a startling discovery: We are what we throw away. It’s in our castoff goods, edibles, chances and people that our authentic selves are revealed; or, as one of his many memorable characters puts it, 'garbage [is] the only truthful thing civilization produced.' Miles mines the depths of waste so artfully that by the end of this extraordinary novel, we’re left with the suspicion that redemption may well be no more, and no less, than an existential salvage operation."
Monologue topics: New York City, feeling overprotective, my best books of 2013
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Episode 233 — Karolina Waclawiak
11 december 2013 · 1 uur 21 min
Karolina Waclawiak is the guest. Her debut novel, How to Get Into the Twin Palms, is now available from Two Dollar Radio. The New York Times Book Review says "Just as Anya reinvents herself, Waclawiak's novel (her first) reinvents the immigration story...At its most illuminating, How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke." And Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls it "A taut debut... [that] strikes with the creeping suddenness of a brush fire." Monologue topics: the dentist, cavities, flossing, contagions, demoralization, wheat, paranoia.
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Episode 232 — Noah Cicero
8 december 2013 · 1 uur 25 min
Noah Cicero is the guest. His new novel is called Go to Work and Do Your Job. Care for Your Children. Pay Your Bills. Obey the Law. Buy Products., and it is available now from Lazy Fascist Press.
Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, says Lees meer"I read Noah Cicero and remember that 'hysterical' can refer to something really funny and to a situation completely out of control. His work punches people in the face. Don't get in its way."
Monologue topics: receiving visitors, gentlemen callers, courting, taking a knee, listicles, bullshit.
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Episode 231 — Colum McCann
4 december 2013 · 1 uur 20 min
Colum McCann is the guest. In 2009, he won the National Book Award for his novel Let the Great World Spin and this year published a new novel called Transatlantic. He is also the curator of a new anthology called The Book of Men, available now from Picador. The Book of Men is the official December selection of The TNB Book Club.
From the publisher: Lees meerTo help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, Esquire asked eighty of the world’s greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, “How to Be a Man.”The result is The Book of Men, an unflinching investigation into the essence of masculinity.
Monologue topics: the app, travel hell, TNB Book Club, kind mail, Narrative 4.
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Episode 230 — Ben Brooks
1 december 2013 · 1 uur 16 min
Ben Brooks is the guest. His new novel, Lolito, is now available from Canongate Books.
Nick Cave says Lees meer"Lolito is the funniest, most horrible book I've read in years. I was blown away."
And The Guardian says
"Both warm and uncompromising, Lolito will be as entertaining for young adults as it is educational for older readers. And if some aspects of the world Brooks inhabits seem alarming, I can't think of a writer I would rather have as my guide."
Monologue topics: coming through in the clutch, voicemail, prank calls, the word 'podcast' as a verb.
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Episode 229 — Jamie Iredell
27 november 2013 · 1 uur 19 min
Jamie Iredell is the guest. His new essay collection, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, is now available from Future Tense.
Scott McClanahan says Lees meer“Jamie Iredell is one of the two or three best writers I know in this world. If you read him—you’ll say the same thing. If you don’t, that’s fine. Your grandchildren will say it one day.”
Monologue topics: bookstores, trying to find 'the perfect book,' low-level panic, Ten Billion, wanting instructions
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Episode 228 — Claire Vaye Watkins
24 november 2013 · 1 uur 26 min
Claire Vaye Watkins is the guest. Her debut story collection, Battleborn, is now available in paperback from Riverhead.
Antonya Nelson, writing for The New York Times Book Review, says Lees meer“Although individual stories stand alone, together they tell the tale of a place, and of the population that thrives and perishes therein… The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary and the factual nicely supplements the fictional… Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side—wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.”
And The Millions says
“As if Watkins’ prose embodies the desert landscape of Nevada itself, the stories are stony, unkind, and harsh, though never unattractive… Beneath these confessions runs a spiritual undertow—that salvific beauty can arise when brutality is brought to light… All of her stories left me feeling purged and oddly cleansed, easily making Battleborn one of the strongest collections I’ve read in years.”
Monologue topics: titles, titling, Dying Young, nakedly depressing titles.
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Episode 227 — Kevin Sampsell
20 november 2013 · 1 uur 27 min
Kevin Sampsell is the guest. His debut novel, This is Between Us, is now available from Tin House Books.
Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins, says Lees meer"In This Is Between Us Kevin Sampsell writes with grace and intimacy about the toughest subject of all—love—and manages to capture a relationship in its natural state: wry and wistful, strange and sexy, humming with desire, quaking with vulnerability."
And Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers, says
"This Is Between Us is an imperturbable, strange, melancholy (but never maudlin) piece of work. Kevin Sampsell straddles the line between candor and oversharing with an artful grace I found infectious."
Monologue topics: mail, art vs. media, Tom Waits, LSD, the devil, doing the podcast live in front of people.
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Episode 226 — Daniel Alarcón
17 november 2013 · 1 uur 21 min
Daniel Alarcón is the guest. His new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, is now available from Riverhead Books. The New York Times Book Review calls it
"Wise and engaging...a provocative study of the way war culture ensnares both participant and observer, the warping fascination of violence, and the disfiguring consequences of the roles we play in public...[a] layered, gorgeously nuanced work…the ending is a quiet bomb, as satisfying as it is ambiguous."
And The Daily Beast says
"Alarcón is a young, talented writer who is on the cusp of a breakthrough, a state of mind perfectly captured by the compulsively energetic voice of At Night We Walk in Circles...a gripping story."
Monologue topics: Conan, M.I.A., projected anxiety, kale, milk, mail, Chelsea Martin, alt-lit.
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Episode 225 — Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon
13 november 2013 · 1 uur 17 min
Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon is the guest. Her debut novel, Nothing, is now available from Two Dollar Radio.
Joy Williams calls it Lees meer"A burning mean and darkly mysterious read."
And Kate Zambreno says
"I could tell you that Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon has written an utterly contemporary novel of our fragmented culture, a novel that I think might be the great American novel of the selfie, brilliantly alternating the narratives of two young travelers partying and searching and losing themselves in the wild West — a Kerouac hitchhiker juxtaposed with the nihilistic, wanting, wandering Ruth and her toxic friendship with her prettier best friend. But this is what I want to tell you—this is what you need to know — Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon writes like a beast, brutal and ecstatic. You need to read this."
Monologue topics: celebrity sightings, Book Soup, voicemail, Elliott Holt, my thing, navelgazing
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Episode 224 — Laura van den Berg
10 november 2013 · 1 uur 35 min
Laura van den Berg is the guest. Her new story collection, The Isle of Youth, is now available from FSG Originals.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, raves Lees meer"If ever there was a writer going places, it’s Laura van den Berg, who follows up her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, with the ambitious, modular The Isle of Youth, whose seven stories are arranged along the themes of family secrets with noirish intrigue."
And The New Inquiry says
“Van den Berg excels at complexity, eccentricity, maximalism of plot…Her emphases on elaborate plot and intentional loose ends are a refreshing departure from the contemporary taste for tidy, minimal plot paired with maximal voices.”
Also this episode: a brief conversation with Victoria Patterson, whose new novel, The Peerless Four, is the official November selection of The TNB Book Club.
Monologue topics: congestion, logistics, obsession with logistics
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Episode 223 — Monica Drake
6 november 2013 · 1 uur 16 min
Monica Drake is the guest. Her new novel, The Stud Book, is now available from Hogarth Press.
Cheryl Strayed says Lees meer“Monica Drake has written a take-your-breath-away good, blow-your-mind wise, crack-your-heart-open beauty of a novel. The Stud Book is a smart, sexy, comic, compassionate, absorbing, and necessary story of our times.”
And Publishers Weekly says
“What really stands out is [Drake's] depiction of [the] city. This is not the twee wonderland of Portlandia…Drake combines [her characters’] lives in a quirky, knowing way, showing the complexities of modern-day female life, species Pacific Northwest native.”
Monologue topics: Sweden, responding to criticism, Google Translator, self-loathing, weakness, humiliation.
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Episode 222 — Doug Dorst
3 november 2013 · 1 uur 22 min
Doug Dorst is the guest. His latest novel, co-authored with film director J.J. Abrams, is called S. (Mulholland Books).
USA Today calls it Lees meer"...an intriguing and impressive experiment in storytelling that's full of paranoia, conspiracy theory, love and mystery..."
And The Telegraph calls it
"...a beautiful hardback carefully distressed to look like an old library book, stuffed with astonishing ephemera (postcards, newspaper clippings, photos, letters) that flutter from the turning pages - and a dose of film-industrial chicanery in its cover claims as well..."
Monologue topics: Halloween, voicemail, Chelsea Martin, shyness, curiosity
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Episode 221 — Jennifer duBois
30 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 8 min
Jennifer duBois is the guest. Her new novel, Cartwheel, is now available from Random House.
The New York Times Book Review calls it Lees meer“Psychologically astute . . . Dubois hits [the] larger sadness just right and dispenses with all the salacious details you can readily find elsewhere. . . . The writing in Cartwheel is a pleasure—electric, fine-tuned, intelligent, conflicted. The novel is engrossing, and its portraiture hits delightfully and necessarily close to home.”
And Entertainment Weekly calls it
“[A] gripping, gorgeously written novel . . . The emotional intelligence in Cartwheel is so sharp it’s almost ruthless—a tabloid tragedy elevated to high art."
Monologue topics: file sharing, Halloween, last minute costume ideas, Windblown Man.
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Episode 220 — Chelsea Martin
27 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 18 min
Chelsea Martin is the guest. Her new book, Even Though I Don't Miss You, is due out from Short Flight / Long Drive Books on November 1, 2013.
Blake Butler says Lees meer"Someone who should not die is Chelsea Martin."
Monologue topics: Mellow Pages Library, mail, suspending disbelief, my current reading taste, experimentalism, immersive reading
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Episode 219 — Davis Schneiderman
23 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 25 min
Davis Schneiderman is the guest. His new novel, [SIC], is now available from Jaded Ibis Productions.
[SIC] includes public domain works published under Davis Schneiderman's name, including everything from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales to Wikipedia pages to genetic codes, along with a transformation of the Jorge Luis Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." [SIC] is part of DEAD/BOOKS trilogy of conceptual works by Schneiderman from Jaded Ibis Press. Other books in the trilogy are Blank (2011), and Ink (forthcoming).
Monologue topics: Simple Kind of Life, Gwen Stefani, Chris de Burgh, Lady in Red, Louisiana, nostalgia, emotional breakdowns.
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218. Jesmyn Ward
20 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 15 min
Jesmyn Ward is the guest. She was the 2011 recipient of the National Book Award for her novel, Salvage the Bones, and her new memoir, Men We Reaped, is now available from Bloomsbury. The New York Times Book Review raves "[Ward] chronicles our American story in language that is raw, beautiful and dangerous… [Her] singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work apart from those that have trodden similar ground… With loving and vivid recollection, she returns flesh to the bones of statistics and slows her ghosts to live again… [It’s a] complicated and courageous testimony." And The Los Angeles Times calls it "Heart-wrenching… A brilliant book about beauty and death… at once a coming-of-age story and a kind of mourning song… filled [with] intimate and familial moments, each described with the passion and precision of the polished novelist Ward has become… Ward is one of those rare writers who’s traveled across America’s deepening class rift with her sense of truth intact. What she gives back to her community is the hurtful honesty of the best literary art." Monologue topics: awards, Alice Munro, The Nobel Prize, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, LSD, Bret Easton Ellis
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Episode 217 — Chris L. Terry
16 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 9 min
Chris L. Terry is the guest. His debut novel, Zero Fade, is now available from Curbside Splendor.
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife, says Lees meer"Chris Terry has bestowed Kevin, the hero of Zero Fade, with an especially acute case of teenage angst, and the results are sweet, painful, and very recognizable to anyone who has survived seventh grade. This is a wonderful book."
And Lindsay Hunter says
"Reading Chris Terry's Zero Fade offered me a glimpse into a cultural experience that isn't mine, but that I could recognize immediately. Vernacular as world. On the surface, it's just language. But this novel isn't surface. The characters speak in rhythms that reveal emotions not identifiable by just words, but I'll name them nonetheless: humor, sadness, confusion, joy, revelation. It's all here in Terry's first novel, a novel that is practically carbonated, how it sparkles and burns."
Monologue topics: the story behind the story, being interviewed, rambling, HPV, cunnilingus, celebrity marital discord
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Episode 216 — Lauren Grodstein
13 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 14 min
Lauren Grodstein is the guest. Her new novel, The Explanation for Everything, is now available from Algonquin Books. It is the official October selection of The TNB Book Club.
Tom Perrotta calls it Lees meer"Very smart and touching and unexpected.”
And The Washington Post says
“[Grodstein has] fashioned in her smart, assured third novel, The Explanation for Everything, . . . a gripping tale of a biologist who finds himself approaching midlife and suddenly finding faith . . . Grodstein’s real gift is her emotional precision . . . Finding or losing God proves to be an equally destabilizing tectonic shift, and this novel is full of them . . . Their cumulative force will leave you happily unsteady, and moved.”
Monologue topics: psychic burden, fear, anxiety, Sisyphus, insomnia, failure, dying alone.
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Episode 215 — Ethel Rohan
9 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 18 min
Ethel Rohan is the guest. Her new story collection, Goodnight Nobody, is now available from Queen's Ferry Press.
Peter Orner raves Lees meer“Ethel Rohan speaks in many voices, all of which need to be heard. She goes so deeply into the hearts and souls of her people. And she wounds, she heals, often in the same sentence. Plain and simple, Goodnight Nobody is a great and unique collection of stories.”
And Roxane Gay says
“Fans of Ethel Rohan’s writing will find, in her latest and outstanding collection, Goodnight Nobody, a writer who has never been more intelligent, more graceful, more moving. Whether it’s a young girl torn between a loving father and an abusive mother, or a photographer who is losing her eyesight while her husband bears witness, or a woman who wants nothing more than a sign from her husband that he sees her, Rohan writes about people searching for a place to belong or a place to breathe or simply, a place to be. In Rohan’s eminently capable hands and words, these stories give us that hope that these searching people she writes will find everything they want or need.”
Monologue topics: Americans' reading habits, polls, sex, sexual dysfunction, lying about sex and reading
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Episode 214 — Cari Luna
6 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 13 min
Cari Luna is the guest. Her debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day, is now available from Tin House.
Kirkus says Lees meer"Luna creates an array of complex characters caught up in emotions, relationships and situations far from the ordinary as they examine their commitment to their merged family and explore their own ideals and expectations. Enlightening and marked by inventive subject matter, intense reflection and stark eloquence."
And Bust magazine raves
"The characters are superbly flawed, and Luna expertly leads us through their vastly different psyches and makes us understand them, even if we don't always sympathize. But just as much as it is a novel of characters, The Revolution of Every Day is the story of a city that's struggling with gentrification, as Cat puts it, 'All the way back to the Dutch and the Indians, yeah?'"
Monologue topics: J.D. Salinger, WWII, weird life sandwiches.
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Episode 213 — Jeff Jackson
2 oktober 2013 · 1 uur 15 min
Jeff Jackson is the guest. His debut novel, Mira Corpora, is now available from Two Dollar Radio.
Don DeLillo says Lees meer"It's fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face."
And Dennis Cooper says
"Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I've read in a very long time. His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice."
Monologue topics: BuzzFeed, lists, sensationalism, Room 32, D.R. Haney
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