Otherppl with Brad Listi: Books & Culture

Latest Episodes:

Episode 306 — Joshua Wolf Shenk Aug 24, 2014

Show notes

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the guest. His new book, Powers of Two, is now available from Eamon Dolan Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Andrew Solomon says "In this surprising, compelling, deeply felt book, Joshua Wolf Shenk banishes the idea of solitary genius by demonstrating that our richest art and science come from collaboration: we need one another not only for love, but also for thinking and imagining and growing and being." And Susan Orlean says "This is a book about magic; about the Beatles; about the chemistry between people; about neuroscience; and about the buddy system; it examines love and hate, harmony and dissonance, and everything in between. The result is wise, funny, surprising, and completely engrossing." Monologue: solitude, individualism, hubris, needing people.

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Episode 305 — Cassandra Troyan Aug 20, 2014

Show notes

Cassandra Troyan is the guest. Her new book, Kill Manual, is available from Artifice Books in October 2014. Chris Kraus says "The sometime-narrator of Kill Manual anastasiasteele3577 haunts chat rooms and BDSM dating sites in search of oblivion. But oblivion hardly needs to be searched for: It’s already there. This disturbing and radical book reveals, among other things, the half-life left in the wake of ubiquitous, data-mined, robotically fabricated internet content. The world ends in exhaustion. Troyan’s piercingly felt, sampled text probes the immateriality of language. Her work is brilliant and brave." And Megan Milks says "This book beats with a steady intensity that is equal parts hot and terrifying; its words are sticky emissions, or fists in the flesh of the eyeball. With a voice both chillingly disembodied and viscerally corporeal, cut with mordant wit, Kill Manual moans, snarls, and laughs, harshly. Riveted by shame, refusing any boundary between pleasure and disgust, with these poems Cassandra Troyan orchestrates a fever march towards negation: 'You are not allowed to call this radical.'" Monologue topics: sleeplessness, My Little Pony, lying, unicorns.

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Episode 304 — Austin Kleon Aug 17, 2014

Show notes

Austin Kleon is the guest. He is the bestselling author of the books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!. Both are available from Workman Publishing. Publishers Weeklysays “Some people are natural self-promoters. For others, it’s painfully difficult to put their work out there. In this creatively designed pocket-sized book, Kleon offers the latter group effective strategies that allow them to share their work without leaving their comfort zone…. Kleon’s advice is sassy and spot-on.” And The Atlantic says "Austin Kleon is positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet... Kleon makes an articulate and compelling case for combinatorial creativity and the role of remix in the idea economy." Monologue topics: creativity, block, doing the work, privilege, fun.

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Episode 303 — Tim O'Connell Aug 13, 2014

Show notes

Tim O'Connell is the guest. He is an editor at Vintage, Anchor, Knopf, and Pantheon. Monologue topics: death, the old man who died, DMT, Tao Lin, Terence McKenna, psychedelic crocodiles who want to rape me, machine elves, fear.

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Episode 302 — Steve Almond Aug 10, 2014

Show notes

Steve Almond is the guest. His new book, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, is due out from Melville House on August 26, 2014. (Author photo: Sharona Jacobs) Publishers Weekly calls it "Powerful… Almond is drawing on his own experiences as a fan to illustrate how difficult the problem, which provides the book with an engaging personal angle that will lure readers who are mature enough to hear him out whether they agree with his conclusions… An important read, even if as Almond concedes, it offers more questions than answers." And Kirkus Reviews says “A provocative, thoughtful examination of an ’astonishingly brutal’ sport… Comic, compassionate and thought-provoking.” Monologue topics: football, fandom, non-fans, football as a lens through which to view the wider culture.

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Episode 301 — Shane Jones Aug 06, 2014

Show notes

Shane Jones is the guest. His latest novel, Crystal Eaters, is now available from Two Dollar Radio. Vice says "Jones demonstrates a tightrope-like eye for finagling between Pynchon-esque quasi-science-fictional feels and the books' physics, allowing almost anything to happen at any time, wrapped in a Wallace-like grip of childlike awe. The result is a novel that, paragraph to paragraph, is alive with imagination. Crystal Eaters is the rarest of kinds of objects, one that replenishes its readers' crystal counts by simply being read." And The Millions says "Crystal Eaters is splattered with Technicolor crystal vomit and eye goo, with bodies leaking red, yellow, and blue; the sun wants to swallow the earth; and the indestructible city encroaches on the country like kudzu. This crystal mining country is Jones’s own Yoknapatawpha County, a town with its own peculiar inhabitants and notions and schemes (such as a prison break in reverse). These fantastical trappings give way to deeper questions — about death, the nature of life, of what it takes to be remembered after you die." Monologue topics: mail, emotionally satisfying mail.

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Episode 300 — Aimee Bender Aug 03, 2014

Show notes

Aimee Bender is the guest. She is the bestselling author of several books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and The Color Master. The LA Times says "Bender’s work has never been the stuff of manic pixie dream-girl lit. Her fairy tales are dark and wicked, not hipster-precious and faux old-timey. Her sorcery altogether avoids the saccharine, and the thrills and chills of this sometimes sexual, often horror-drenched collection are completely adult. At a time when realism reigns supreme over the literary landscape, one can argue it is absolutely imperative that Aimee Bender be spotlighted for what she is: a vital MVP of modern letters, period…In our world of flash-and-trash insta-Internet-oddities and stranger-than-fiction social-media-bloopers, she will have surpassed the simple feat of inventiveness to own a most dazzlingly urgent relevancy." And The Wall Street Journal says “The fairy-tale elements in her writing, far from seeming outlandish, highlight the everyday nature of her characters’ flaws and struggles. In Ms. Bender’s stories and novels, relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities.” Monologue topics: Episode 300, thank you.

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Episode 299 — Dan Chaon Jul 30, 2014

Show notes

Dan Chaon is the guest. He is the acclaimed author of several books, including the story collection Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award, Stay Awake, and You Remind Me of Me. The Boston Globe calls him "The modern day John Cheever." And the New York Times Book Review calls his work "Superbly disquieting." Monologue topics: complaining, Twitter, robots, simplicity, second-guessing.

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Episode 298 — Stuart Dybek Jul 27, 2014

Show notes

Stuart Dybek is the guest. He is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and poetry, including Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, Streets in Their Own Ink, and I Sailed With Magellan. George Saunders says "[Stuart Dybek] somehow manages to conjure up beautiful, detailed imitations of real America, and then infuse them with so much surreal truth that they read like myths or fairy tales. Like the Chicago he often writes about, his work is full of genuine sentiment, and edge, and beauty. One of the most soulful writers in America, and a national treasure." And the Chicago Tribune calls him "A magician comparable to Eudora Welty and Joy Williams." Monologue topics: Episode 300, wondering if it means anything, writing in coffee shops, guilt.

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Episode 297 — Cynthia Bond Jul 23, 2014

Show notes

Cynthia Bond is the guest. Her debut novel, Ruby, is now available from Hogarth Press. Ruby is the official July selection of The TNB Book Club. Edwidge Danticat raves “Reading Cynthia Bond’s Ruby, you can’t help but feel that one day this book will be considered a staple of our literature, a classic. Lush, deep, momentous, much like the people and landscape it describes, Ruby enchants not just with its powerful tale of lifelong quests and unrelenting love, but also with its exquisite language. It is a treasure of a book, one you won’t soon forget.” And the Dallas Morning News says "In Ruby, Bond has created a heroine worthy of the great female protagonists of Toni Morrison…and Zora Neale Hurston… Bond’s style of writing is as magical as an East Texas sunrise, with phrases so deftly carved, the reader is often distracted from the brutality described by the sheer beauty of the language.” Monologue topics: mail, war, peace, duality, mocking myself.

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