Info

Otherppl with Brad Listi

A weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading authors. Hosted by Brad Listi.
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
2019
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2017
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2015
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2014
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2013
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2012
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2011
December
November
October
September


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: 2019
Episode 585 — Elvia Wilk 0
Jun 19, 2019
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.
Episode 584 — Kathryn Scanlan 0
Jun 12, 2019
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. 
Episode 583 — Jennifer Pastiloff 0
Jun 5, 2019
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.
Episode 582 — Elisa Gabbert 0
May 29, 2019
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. 
Episode 581 — Saskia Vogel 0
May 22, 2019
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.
Episode 580 — Lydia Fitzpatrick 0
May 15, 2019
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.    
Episode 579 — Lilliam Rivera 0
May 8, 2019
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.

Episode 578 — Balli Kaur Jaswal 0
May 1, 2019
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.


Episode 577 — David Shields 0
Apr 24, 2019
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.
Episode 576 — T Kira Madden 0
Apr 17, 2019
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.
Episode 575 — Lori Gottlieb 0
Apr 10, 2019
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.
Episode 574 — Richard Chiem 0
Apr 3, 2019
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.

Chiem is also the author of You Private Person (Sorry House Classics). It was named one of Publishers Weekly's 10 Essential Books of the American West. His work has appeared in City Arts Magazine, NY Tyrant, and Gramma Poetry, among other places. He lives in Seattle, WA. 
 
In today's monologue, I respond to some listener mail.
Episode 573 — Chloe Aridjis 0
Mar 31, 2019

Chloe Aridjis is the guest. Her new novel Sea Monsters is available from Catapult.

Aridjis is a Mexican-American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

In today's monologue, I talk briefly about the late Edouard Levé.

Episode 572 — Eva Hagberg Fisher 0
Mar 27, 2019
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.
Episode 571 — Roger McNamee 0
Mar 20, 2019
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.
Episode 570 — Steve Anwyll 0
Mar 13, 2019
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. 
Episode 569 — Pam Houston 0
Mar 6, 2019
Pam Houston is the guest. Her new essay collection, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, is available now from W.W. Norton & Co.

Houston's other books include two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.

Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other anthologies.She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. 

She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. 
Episode 568 — Sam Lipsyte 0
Mar 3, 2019
Sam Lipsyte is the guest. His new novel, Hark, is available now from Simon & Schuster.

This is Sam's second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 154, on March 6, 2013.

Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and The Fun Parts, and three other novels: The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
In today's monologue, I talk about my condition during this interview.
Episode 567 — Sarah McColl 0
Feb 27, 2019
Sarah McColl is the guest. Her debut memoir, Joy Enough, is available now from Liveright Publishing.

McColl's essays have appeared in Paris Review, McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, where she was named the 2017 Mary Carswell Fellow, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Wrangell Mountains Center. 
 
Before receiving her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, she was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. Her food writing has been featured in print and online for Bon Appétit, House Beautiful, The Guardian, Modern Farmer, Extra Crispyand others. She teaches creative writing and is based in Los Angeles, California.
 
In today's monologue, I talk about the man with the doodle.
Episode 566 — Madhuri Vijay 0
Feb 20, 2019
Madhuri Vijay is the guest. Her debut novel, The Far Field, is available now from Grove Press.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Vijay was born in Bangalore. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her writing has appeared in Best American Non-Required Reading, Narrative Magazine and Salon, among other publications. The Far Field is her first book. 
 
In today's monologue, I basically just get right to the conversation.
Episode 565 — Peter Stenson 0
Feb 17, 2019
Peter Stenson is the guest. His new novel Thirty Seven is available from Dzanc Books. It is the official February pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Stenson received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His first novel, Fiend, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2013. His stories and essays have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and family in Denver, Colorado.
 
In today's monologue, I talk about having the flu.
Episode 564 — Brad Phillips 0
Feb 13, 2019

Brad Phillips is the guest. His new story collection, Essays and Fictions, is available from Tyrant Books.

The late Anthony Bourdain calls it: "Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing. [Phillips] peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." 

Born in 1974, Phillips is also an accomplished visual artist  known for dark work that engages with themes of eroticism, depression, and mortality. His paintings display stylistic breadth, from text-based to photorealist, referring in many cases directly to his daily life. He lives in Toronto.

Episode 563 — Duke Haney 0
Feb 6, 2019
Duke Haney is the guest. His new essay collection, Death Valley Superstars, is available now from Delancey Street Press.
 
Haney has spent most of his adult life working in the movie business, with twenty feature-film credits as an actor and twenty-two as a screenwriter.  He used pseudonyms for some of the screenplays and went by “D. R. Haney” as the author of a novel, Banned for Life, and an essay collection, Subversia. After he was struck by a car in a crosswalk on Sunset Boulevard, a friend claimed he walked like John “Duke” Wayne and gave him the nickname by which most people know him and he has adopted belatedly as his pen name. He plans to follow Death Valley Superstars with a novel tentatively titled XXX.
 
This is Duke's second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 36 on January 18, 2012.
 
In today's monologue, I talk a bit about witnessing the birth of Duke's book.
Episode 562 — Ingrid Rojas Contreras 0
Jan 30, 2019
Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the guest. Her debut novel, FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE (Doubleday), is a national bestseller, an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor's choice.

Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Contreras' essays and short stories have appeared in theNew York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area's NPR affiliate, teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and works with immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing writers into public schools. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
 
In today's monologue, I read some more mail.
Episode 561 — Thomas Kohnstamm 0
Jan 23, 2019
Thomas Kohnstamm is the guest. His debut novel, Lake City, is available from Counterpoint Press. It is the official January pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Kohnstamm is also the author of Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?(Crown). He was born in Seattle and lives there with his wife and two children.
 
In today's monologue, I read some listener mail. 
1 2 Next »
©Otherppl with Brad Listi.