

Otherppl with Brad Listi
Brad Listi
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly books and culture podcast featuring in-depth conversations with today's leading authors. Literature, screenwriting, the creative process, pop culture, and more. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Bluesky and Instagram.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jan 16, 2013 • 1h 22min
Episode 140 — Rosie Schaap
Rosie Schaap is the guest. She is a contributor to This American Life and npr.org, and she writes the monthly "Drink" column for The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir, Drinking With Men, will be published on January 24, 2013 by Riverhead Books.
Kate Christensen raves
"This book will be a classic. There is so much joy in this book! It’s a great, comforting, wonderful, funny, inspiring, moving memoir about community and belief and the immense redemptive powers of alcohol drunk properly."
And Wendy McClure says
"There are bar stories and there are coming-of-age stories. And then there is Rosie Schaap's thoughtful and funny chronicle that reminds us of all the drinks, dives, and deep conversations that helped make us who we are. This is a wise, engaging memoir."
Monologue topics: beautiful people, staring, Los Angeles, DNA masterpieces, hand signals, safety words.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 13, 2013 • 1h 15min
Episode 139 — xTx
xTx is the guest. She is the author of the story collection Normally Special, and her new chapbook, Billie the Bull, has just been published by Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press.
Says Dennis Cooper:
“xTx is the complete young literary god. Billie the Bull is mind-bogglingly and intricately superb down to its tiniest punctuation marks. To me, she’s about as great as it can get. Seriously, I’m awestruck."
Monologue topics: my unit, my thing, this podcast, hybridized forms, navel-gazing, confusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 9, 2013 • 1h 29min
Episode 138 — Panio Gianopoulos
Panio Gianopoulos is the guest. He's the author of the novella A Familiar Beast, now available from Nouvella Books.
Jim Lynch, author of Truth Like the Sun, raves
“A Familiar Beast is superb. Always engaging and often provocative, it follows the gut-tightening travails of a man hollowed by his own infidelities. With elegant prose, unforgettable scenes and Philip Roth-like psychological insights, Panio Gianopoulos’s debut novella marks the arrival of a bright and gifted writer.”
And Adam Langer, author of The Thieves of Manhattan, says
“Elegant, erudite and witty, this extremely well-observed and surprisingly suspenseful story offers more insights into love and human relationships than most authors manage in works three times as long.”
Monologue topics: mail, Facebook suicide, savage narcissism, Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 6, 2013 • 1h 19min
Episode 137 — Eli Horowitz
Eli Horowitz is the guest. He was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s for eight years, where he worked closely with a variety of notable authors, including Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Vollmann. His latest project is called The Silent History, a serialized novel designed for the iPad and iPhone.
Wired magazine calls it
"Entirely revolutionary."
The New York Times calls it
"One of the most talked-about new experiments [in publishing]."
And The Los Angeles Times calls it
“A landmark project that illuminates a possible future for e-book novels."
Monologue topics: blood pressure, heart rate, Tweets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 2, 2013 • 1h 17min
Episode 136 — Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt is today's guest. She's the award-winning author of several books. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist, and her second novel, All Souls, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, Prosperous Friends, is now available from Grove Press.
Sam Lipsyte raves
"Prosperous Friends is masterful, a comic-tragic astonishment. Christine Schutt continues to write some of the most original and rewarding prose I've ever read."
And Gary Lutz says
“It is no longer a secret that Christine Schutt is the finest writer among us, and Prosperous Friends is her finest work yet. There isn't a corner in any of her sentences left ungraced by her lyrical genius, her heart-fathoming wisdom. A few pages in, you'll know you have a classic in your hands."
Monologue topics: New Year's resolutions, killing my Facebook account, purging, getting rid of things, newspapers, radios. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 30, 2012 • 1h 24min
Episode 135 — Brian Allen Carr
Brian Allen Carr is today's guest. He is the award-winning author of the story collection Short Bus, and his latest collection, Vampire Conditions, is now available from Holler Presents.
Harrold Jaffe says
"Vampire Conditions melds a precise Texas regional with gothic, recalling Flannery O'Connor, who wrote out of Georgia. But Carr's intricate narrative patterns, jump cuts and unanticipated segueshave a distinctly postmodern feel. Any way you cut it, Brian Allen Carr is a potently eccentric writer."
And Robert Lopez raves
"At turns dark and brutal and wickedly funny, Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions will put you in mind of Hannah, Pancake, Powell. This book will grab you by the throat and knock the wind out of you, will make you want to drive south, raise hell, hide out, call home, tell your friends."
Monologue topics: dreams, childbirth, salad bars, fetuses, Christmas, doll houses, emasculation, 2012, passage of time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 26, 2012 • 1h 13min
Episode 134 — Robert Kloss
Robert Kloss is the guest. His latest novel, The Alligators of Abraham, is now available from Mud Luscious Press.
David Ohle raves
"In this amazing, collapsed-time text, I’m led along dark alleys of American history by an all-seeing voice-over narrative that reports on things from a great height and in an ultra-factual way. Familiar events of war, sorrow and struggle are seen anew, as if on a slide under a microscope.”
And Adam Braver says
“In The Alligators of Abraham, Robert Kloss drops us into the darkness of the Civil War, showing a culture perpetually on the edge of extinction. Yet out of that murky world, hazed and fogged, rise the clear and distinct shapes of a people not ready to surrender to their own haunting. A novel as lyrical as it is precise in its depiction of the struggle to maintain dignity.”
Monologue topics: burnout, empty-headedness, children's books, subversive kid poems, the power of one, ripple effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 23, 2012 • 1h 25min
Episode 133 — Mira Gonzalez
Mira Gonzalez is today's guest. Her debut poetry collection is called I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together. It is due out from Sorry House in late January 2013.
Blake Butler says
"Mira Gonzalez’s brain spans the weird space between bodies stuffed with Ambien and food and light from porn on laptops in an anxious, calming kind of way, one concerned more with what blood tastes like than how the blood got out. It’s messed up and feels honest, open, like lying naked on the floor with your arms chopped off."
And Victor 'Kool A.D.' Vasquez says
"Mira Gonzalez is doing her thing. I fuck with these poems. I felt bad for her when she talked about how that dude said 'I’m gonna come on your stomach' like 15-20 times and then didn’t."
Monologue topics: Christmas, travel, my daughter, Best Parts / Worst Parts, sobbing fits, losing it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 19, 2012 • 1h 16min
Episode 132 — Diana Wagman
Diana Wagman is the guest. She is the author of four novels and a past recipient of the PEN West Award for Fiction. Her latest novel, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, is now available from Ig Publishing. It is the December selection of The TNB Book Club.
Publishers Weekly raves
“Wagman’s talent for imagery is well served by the subject matter, and the story is perfectly paced, with humorous breaks in the tension. A PEN Center USA Award winner (for Spontaneous), Wagman has crafted an unusual thriller for psychological crime devotees and fans of the peculiar.”
And Book Page calls it
"...a dark, funny and sensitive thriller that might be the first of its kind: the Oedipal abduction tale.”
Monologue topics: holidays, heaviness, Sandy Hook, humanity, self-loathing, anger, depression, compassion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 16, 2012 • 1h 34min
Episode 131 — Ned Vizzini
Ned Vizzini is today's guest. He is the award-winning author of It's Kind of a Funny Story (also a major motion picture), Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah.... In television, he has written for MTV and ABC. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Salon. He is the co-author, with Chris Columbus, of the fantasy-adventure series House of Secrets, due out in April 2013. And his latest novel, The Other Normals, is now availalbe from Balzer & Bray.
Lev Grossman raves
"The Other Normals is wildly imaginative, incredibly funny, and weirdly wise. I don’t know where Vizzini gets this stuff —it’s like he’s tapped into the collective unconscious of alienated adolescents everywhere."
And Kirkus says
"With a deft sense of humor and a keen ear for funny and realistic teen dialogue, Vizzini explores one teen everyman’s quest to become a hero, one roll of the six-sided die at a time …. Great geeky fun."
Monologue topics: flu, mail, doubt, self-sabotage, cannabis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices


