Shane Jones is the guest. His latest novel, Vincent and Alice and Alice, is available from Tyrant Books. It is the official August pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Shane's second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 301 on August 6, 2014.

Jones' other books include the novels Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters.

He lives in Albany, New York.

In today's monologue, I talk briefly about the guy at the cafe who had a problem with my dog. 

Juliet Escoria is the guest. Her debut novel, Juliet the Maniac, is available from Melville House. It was the official May pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Juliet's second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 273 on April 30, 2014.

She also wrote the short story collection Black Cloud, which was originally published in 2014 by Civil Coping Mechanisms. In 2015, Emily Books published the ebook, Maro Verlag published a German translation, and Los Libros de la Mujer Rota published a Spanish translation. Witch Hunt, a collection of poems, was published by Lazy Fascist Press in 2016. 

Escoria was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia.

In today's monologue, I respond to more listener mail. 

Sarah Rose Etter is the guest. Her debut novel, The Book of X, is available from Two Dollar Radio.

She is also the author of the chapbook Tongue Party, selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the Caketrain Press award.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cut, Electric Literature, Guernica, VICE, New York Tyrant, Juked, Night Block, The Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Collagist, and more. 

She is the co-founder of the TireFire Reading Series, and a contributing editor at The Fanzine. She has also served as an arts columnist at Philadelphia Weekly.

She has been awarded residences at Disquiet International program in Portugal and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. In 2017, she was the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Bordeaux, France, where she presented on surrealist writing as a mode of feminism.

She earned her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Rosemont College.

In today's monologue, I respond to listener mail.

J. Ryan Stradal is the guest. His new novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, is available from Viking / Pamela Dorman Books.

 

This is Stradal's second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 376 on August 19, 2015.

His first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, reached the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list at #19 on its third week of release. His shorter writing has appeared in Hobart, The Rumpus, The Wall Street Journal, Granta, The Guardian, Electric Literature, The Nervous Breakdown, and more. 

He lives in Los Angeles.

Chip Cheek is the guest. His debut novel, Cape May, is available from Celadon Books.

Cheek's stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Washington Square, and other journals and anthologies. He has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston.

For many years, Chip taught fiction at GrubStreet in Boston. He now lives in El Segundo, California, with his wife and daughter. 

 

In today's monologue, I respond to listener mail.

Steve Almond is the guest. His new book, William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, is available from Ig Publishing.

This is Steve's fourth time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 9, on October 16, 2011, and again in Episode 302, on August 10, 2014, and Episode 513, on April 8, 2018.

Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. You can check those out here.

 

Last year, he published Bad Stories, a literary investigation of what the hell just happened to our country, which he wrote to keep from going crazy. (You can find his latest rants here or here.)

For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. His short stories have been anthologized widely, in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy, DIY books.

 

In today's monologue, I basically get right to the interview.

Erin Hosier is the guest. Her new memoir, Don't Let Me Down, is available from Atria Books.

Hosier is the coauthor of Hit So Hard by Patty Schemel (Da Capo, 2017). She has been a literary agent since 2001 (currently with Dunow Carlson & Lerner), and was an original co-host of the Literary Death Match. As an agent, she primarily works with authors of nonfiction and has a special interest in popular culture, music biography, humor, women's history (and untold stories of all kinds). She lives in Brooklyn.

 

In the monologue, I read mail from listeners regarding last week's episode, and offer my own reflections on same.

Bret Easton Ellis is the guest. His new essay collection, White, is available from Knopf.

Ellis is the author of six novels, including Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, and a collection of stories, which have been translated into thirty-two languages. He lives in Los Angeles and is the host of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, available on Patreon.

 

In today's monologue, I basically get right to the interview.

Karen Stefano is the guest. Her new book, What a Body Remembers: A Memoir of Sexual Assault and Its Aftermath, is available from Rare Bird Books.

It is the official June pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Stefano's other books include the short story collection The Secret Games of Words (1GlimpsePress 2015) and the how-to business writing guide, Before Hitting Send (Dearborn 2011). Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, California Lawyer, The South Carolina Review, Tampa Review, Epiphany, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and many other journals and magazines.

 

In today's monologue, I venture (briefly) into the fraught territory of public morality.

Elvia Wilk is the guest. Her debut novel, Oval, is available from Soft Skull Press.

Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She contributes to publications like Frieze, Mousse, Metropolis, Artforum, and Zeit Online. From 2012 to 2016 she was a founding editor at uncube magazine and from 2016 to 2018 she was the publications editor for transmediale. She is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal and is finishing a masters at the New School for Social Research. She has taught at the University of the Arts Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York. 

 

In today's monologue, I offer some brief closing thoughts on the transcripts fundraiser.

Kathryn Scanlan is the guest. Her new book, Aug 9 — Fog, is available from MCD Books.

Scanlan lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in NOON, Fence, American Short Fiction, Tin House, Caketrain, and The Iowa Review, among other publications.

In today's monologue, I talk about being recognized in public. 

Jennifer Pastiloff is the guest. Her new book, On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard, is available from Dutton.

Pastiloff travels the world with her unique workshop On Being Human, a hybrid of yoga-related movement, writing, sharing aloud, letting the snot fly, and the occasional dance party. She has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, Health Magazine, CBS News, and others for her unique style of teaching, which she has taught to thousands of women in sold-out workshops all over the world.

Jen is also the guest speaker at Canyon Ranch and Miraval Resorts, and she leads Writing and The Body workshops with author Lidia Yuknavitch, as well as retreats with Emily Rapp Black. Founder of the online magazine The Manifest Station, when Jen is not traveling she is based in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

 

In today's monologue, I give an update on transcripts and announce a two-week Otherppl t-shirt sale to raise funds.

Elisa Gabbert is the guest. Her new essay collection, The Word Pretty, is available from Black Ocean Press.

This is Elisa's second time on the podcast. She first appeared in Episode 241 on January 8, 2014.

Gabbert is a poet and essayist whose other books include L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Word Pretty was a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Elisa’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, Boston Review, the Paris Review Daily, Pacific Standard, Guernica, The Awl, Electric Literature, the Harvard Review, Threepenny Review, Real Life, Catapult, Jubilat, Diagram, and many other venues. She is currently writing a book about disaster culture and human failure, The Unreality of Memory, forthcoming from FSG Originals. She lives in Denver.

Other adventures: Elisa writes an advice column for writers, The Blunt Instrument, at Electric Literature. Send her a question at blunt@electricliterature.com. She occasionally writes about perfume for Bois de Jasmin. She occasionally teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She has co-written several collaborative collections with Kathleen Rooney, including That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness. She holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College.

 

In today's monologue, I discuss the status of podcast transcripts, and thank those who have volunteered to help. 

Saskia Vogel is the guest. Her debut novel, Permission, is available from Coach House Books. 

Vogel was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in its sister city, Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator.

Previously she worked as Granta magazine’s global publicist and as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on pornography and adult pleasure products. She volunteers her time as the honorary secretary of SELTA and as part of the team that organizes Viva Erotica, an annual film festival in Helsinki that explores the art, history, and culture of sex on film.

 

In today's monologue, I respond to listener mail.

Lydia Fitzpatrick is the guest. Her debut novel, Lights All Night Long, is available from Penguin Press.

Fitzpatrick’s work has appeared in the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and a recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. She graduated from Princeton University and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughters.

 

In today's monologue, I respond to some mail.    

Lilliam Rivera is the guest. Her new YA novel, Dealing in Dreams, is available from Simon & Schuster.

Rivera's previous novel,The Education of Margot Sanchez (February 2017) was nominated for a 2019 Rhode Island Teen Book Award, a 2017 Best Fiction for Young Adult Fiction by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and has been featured on NPR, New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, MTV.com, and Teen Vogue, among others.

 

She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. Lilliam has also been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Speculative Literature Foundation. Her short story "Death Defiant Bomba" received honorable mention in Bellevue Literary Review's 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander. She recently received honorable mention in the 2018 James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.

Lilliam's work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, Lenny Letter, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and more. She has been a featured speaker in countless schools and book festivals throughout the United States and teaches creative writing workshops.

In today's monologue, I have a brief conversation with Juliet Escoria, author of the debut novel Juliet the Maniac (Melville House), the official May pick of the TNB Book Club.

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the guest. Her new novel, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, is available from William Morrow. It is the official April 2019 pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Jaswal is the author of Inheritance, which won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014 and was adapted into a film at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts in 2017. Her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the 2015 inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. 

Her third novel Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (Harper Collins/William Morrow) was released internationally to critical acclaim in March 2017. Translation rights to this novel have been sold in France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Greece, China, Brazil and Estonia. Film rights to Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows have been acquired by Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free Productions and Film Four in the UK. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was also picked by Reese Witherspoon’s book club and The Girly Book Club in 2018.

Jaswal’s short fiction and non-fiction writing have appeared in the UK Sunday Express, Cosmopolitan Magazine,The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Conde Nast Travellerand Best Australian Short Stories, among other publications and periodicals. She has travelled widely to appear in international writers festivals to conduct workshops and lectures on creative writing, pursuing an artistic career, the power of storytelling, global citizenship and social justice advocacy through literature. A former writing fellow at the University of East Anglia, Jaswal has taught creative writing at Yale-NUS College and Nanyang Technological University where she is currently pursuing a PhD. 

 

In today's monologue, I get right to the interview.

David Shields is the guest. His two most recent books are The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power (Mad Creek Books) and Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention (Thought Catalog Books).

Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel was released by First Pond Entertainment in 2017.

 

A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. He lives in Seattle.

T Kira Madden is the guest. Her new memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is available from Bloomsbury. It was the official March pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. There is no period in her name.

In today's monologue, I talk about buying a birthday gift for my wife.

Lori Gottlieb is the guest. Her new memoir, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author who writes the weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column for The Atlantic. She has written hundreds of articles related to psychology and culture, many of which have become viral sensations all over the world. A contributing editor for the Atlantic, she also writes for The New York Times Magazine, and appears as a frequent expert on relationships, parenting, and hot-button mental health topics in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Dr. Phil, CNN, and NPR. 

 

In today's monologue, I basically get right to the conversation.

Richard Chiem is the guest. His new novel, King of Joy, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 

This is Richard's second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 142 on January 23, 2013.

Eva Hagberg Fisher is the guest. Her new book, How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Life-Saving Friendship, is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Eva's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Wallpaper*, Wired, and Dwell, among other places. She holds degrees in architecture from UC Berkeley and Princeton as well as a PhD in Visual and Narrative Culture from UC Berkeley. 

 

In today's monologue, I respond to listener mail.

Roger McNamee is the guest. His new book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, is a New York Times bestseller, available from Penguin Press.

McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He co-founded successful funds in venture, crossover and private equity. His most recent fund, Elevation, included U2’s Bono as a co-founder. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Roger plays bass and guitar in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System and is the author of The New Normal and The Moonalice Legend: Posters and Words, Volumes 1-9. He has served as a technical advisor for seasons two through five of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series and was also responsible for raising the money that created the Wikimedia Foundation.

In today's monologue, I talk about Disorder Salon, a new reading series starting up in New Orleans.

Steve Anwyll is the guest. His debut novel, Welfare, is available from Tyrant Books.

Anwyll's work has appeared in Hobart and Tyrant Magazine, among other places. He lives in Montreal.

 

In today's monologue, I answer a question from a listener regarding his brother's impending marriage.