Otherppl with Brad Listi: Books & Culture

Latest Episodes:

Episode 346 — Halle Butler Feb 18, 2015

Show notes

Halle Butler is the guest. Her debut novel, Jillian, is available now from Curbside Splendor. Lindsay Hunter says "This book is incredible. The deadpan way it nails what it is to be a human who lies to herself and tells different lies to everyone else makes me want to laugh and scream. It is hilarious and weird, my two favorite qualities in a book." And Kirkus Reviews says "[Jillian] offers up its characters for hatred and ridicule with such energy, obsessive detail and hopelessness that the reader can't help but read on, through exasperating flinches of sympathy and recognition. A novel that reads like rubbernecking or a junk-food binge, compelling a horrified fascination and bleak laughter in the face of outrageously painted everyday sadness." Monologue topics: thanks, worry, sleeplessness, corporate pitchman fantasies, idealism, crazy people, Starbucks, Valentine's Day, my dog, jokes that fail to land.

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Episode 345 — Porochista Khakpour Feb 11, 2015

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Porochista Khakpour is the guest. Her novel The Last Illusion is now available from Bloomsbury. Claire Messud says “Utterly original and compelling, Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion weaves Iranian myth with very contemporary American neurosis to create a bittersweet poetry all its own. This ambitious, exciting literary adventure is at once grotesque, amusing, deeply sad—and wonderful, too.” And Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it "An audaciously ambitious novel that teeters along a tightrope but never falls off." Monologue topics: big news, superstition, not wanting to be dominated by superstition despite demonstrably being dominated by superstition by knocking wood repeatedly.

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Episode 344 — Kitty Feb 04, 2015

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Kitty is the guest. She is a rapper/musician whose latest EP, Frostbite, is now available. RollingStone says "Love is pain, and nobody understands that quite like this suburban teen-rap every-girl. Pryde went viral with ["Okay Cupid"]...a homemade mumblecore hit, in the voice of a bored kid from Florida. It's full of wit ("It's my party, couldn't cry if I wanted to") and mall-rat ambience, as she waits for her boyfriend's drunk-dials at 3:30 a.m." And The New York Times says "She doesn’t rap because it’s funny or novel, but rather because it’s simply the best and most comfortable tool available to her. The results so far, while almost no one has been watching, have the intimacy and comfort of private recordings. They transfix." Monologue topics: privilege, mail.

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Episode 343 — Tim Johnston Jan 28, 2015

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Tim Johnston is the guest. His new novel, Descent, is available now from Algonquin Books. It is the official January selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. The Washington Post raves “I’ve read many variations on this theme, some quite good, but never one as powerful as Tim Johnston’s Descent . . . The story unfolds brilliantly, always surprisingly, but the glory of Descent lies not in its plot but in the quality of the writing. The magic of his prose equals the horror of Johnston’s story; each somehow enhances the other . . . Read this astonishing novel. It’s the best of both worlds.” And Mary Roach says “Descent is the best novel I've read in a long time. Unlike most books that fall into the category of Page Turner, this one also falls in the category of Writing So Good You Can't Even Believe It. Johnston has a superhuman gift for watching and listening to the world and rendering, on the page, its beauty and savagery with such detail and power that the story feels almost more like memory than something read. I was so absorbed in the final incredible fifty pages that I missed my flight to La Guardia.” Monologue topics: Ann Bauer, Salon, writing, writers, money, class, privilege, honesty, The Struggle.

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Episode 342 — Alexis Coe Jan 21, 2015

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Alexis Coe is the guest. She is the author of Alice + Freda Forever, available now from Pulp/Zest Books. Peter Orner says "Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890's that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here's a real crime of passion. Or was it? 'And so Alice carried the razor around every day in her dress pocket, just in case Freda came to town…' I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down." And Vol. 1 Brooklyn says "Though the history recounted in Alexis Coe's Alice + Freda Forever is captivating in its own right, Coe also provides a larger context for it, elevating this to the level of a societal indictment. This story of a star-crossed love with a violent ending at times reads like a microcosm of Memphis at the end of the 19th century. As Coe's narrative delves into perceptions of sexuality and the ways in which the case touched on different aspects of daily life, it never loses sight of the tragic romance at its core." Monologue topics: mail, Chelsea Hodson, prurience, sex, manners, gender.

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Episode 341 — Cameron Pierce Jan 14, 2015

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Cameron Pierce is the guest. He is the author of several books and the editor of Lazy Fascist Press. Vol. 1 Brooklyn says "Whether he's describing a grandmother who gets pulled into a watery grave by an almost mythological fish or telling the creepy story of a creature that wouldn't be out of place in an H.P. Lovecraft story, Pierce constantly pulls together concepts from the outmost edges of outré fiction and the kind of unassumingly profound storytelling that made authors like Flannery O'Connor and George Singleton household names." And Beach Sloth says “Black humor has never been darker than this; this is the absolute pitch black of humor." Monologue topics: war, war on terror, word usage, Charlie Hebdo, terrorism.

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Episode 340 — Chelsea Hodson Jan 07, 2015

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Chelsea Hodson is the guest. Her chapbook entitled Pity the Animal is available now in print from Future Tense Books at Powells.com, and electronically from Emily Books as a Kindle Single. Tobias Carroll calls it “One of the best literary works I’ve encountered this year... much of its power comes from the way it juxtaposes seemingly unrelated elements: a retrospective of Marina Abramović’s art, scenes from Hodson’s life, economic musings, and considerations of adventure. The way these eventually coalesce is immeasurably powerful; the accumulated effect is devastating, and hits harder than many works ten times its length.” And Bitch magazine calls it "Pointed, scathing, and suspenseful. This critical yet intimate essay is not to be missed." Monologue topics: leafblowers, chainsaws, suffering.

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Episode 339 — Mark Gluth Dec 31, 2014

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Mark Gluth is the guest. His new novel No Other is available now from Sator Press. Kate Zambreno says "In Mark Gluth's beautiful family gothic No Other, the reader encounters a landscape of mood and mystery, burning with a stripped-down pain. Gluth's sentences devastate in their raw economy, attempting to penetrate the everyday, tracing abbreviated existences struggling to survive through bare seasons." And Blake Butler says "In clipped, incantatory verse shined from whorls somewhere between Gummo and As I Lay Dying, Mark Gluth's No Other invents new ambient psychological terraforma of rare form, a world by turns humid and eerie, nowhere and now, like a blacklight in a locked room." Monologue topics: the holidays, Santa, mail, answering questions with questions.

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Episode 338 — Luke B. Goebel Dec 24, 2014

Show notes

Luke B. Goebel is the guest. His new novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, is now available from Fiction Collective Two. Kirkus Reviews says “If Kerouac were writing today, his work might look something like this—and despite the title, many of the stories are indeed ours, as they focus on love and loss, pain and yearning.… This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book—and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.” And Lidia Yuknavitch says "I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on." Monologue topics: holidays, Santa Claus, lying, shattering my daughter's dream.

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Episode 337 — Lynn Lurie Dec 17, 2014

Show notes

Lynn Lurie is the guest. Her new novel, Quick Kills, is available now from Etruscan Press. Kirkus Reviews says "Prepare to be disturbed by this slim but disquieting novel about the perils of youth and the trespasses committed against a young girl. This second novel by Lurie (Corner of the Dead, 2008) is purposefully vague in its descriptions but nevertheless carries with it a feeling of dread for its unnamed female narrator. As the book opens, she is roughly 13 years old and engaged in an unsuitable relationship with a photographer who tells her that young girls fill canvasses and who takes many, many nude photographs of her. She also has a rough-and-tumble brother, Jake, and a fragile sister, Helen. Their father, a hunter, also seems to represent an omnipresent threat. In one scene, Helen arrives with smeared eyeliner, trailing blood: "As she passes me in the foyer, she says to Mother. I had nothing to do with this. Why don't you ask Daddy?" The mother in question is equally guilty of the crimes of this household, emotionally absent and quick to overlook the obvious damage being done to her daughters. As the narrator indulges her own interests in photographing the world around her, readers should experience these flashes of imagery much as she does—the grotesque and the beautiful, all wrapped up in one another. By the end of the book, it becomes a story of survivor's guilt as the narrator invests her hurt in brief, broken and unwise liaisons. "By having done nothing all these years I didn't protect the others that must have come after me," she admits, in the end. As a bildungsroman, the story is lacking in detail, emotional depth and character arc, but it nevertheless leaves a frightening and lingering restlessness in its wake that may be hard for readers to shake." Monologue topics: moving, freezing, rain, 24-hr grocery stores, the dirty heart of LA, cosmically significant accidental verbal puns.

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