Otherppl with Brad Listi

Here we are again. Another year in the books. Another Holiday Spectacular episode of the Otherppl podcast. This year, the Spectacular was recorded at 8 a.m. rather than the traditional evening hour. The reason? I was disorganized and scrambling to assemble a team of people willing to participate in this questionable annual rite. Thankfully, my friends Joseph Grantham, Gene Morgan, and Timothy Will...

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the novel No One Left to Come Looking for You (Simon & Schuster). Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Pari...

Allegra Hyde is the author of the novel Eleutheria, available from Vintage. It is the official December pick of the TNB Book Club. Hyde's debut story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, and The Best American Travel Wr...

Emily Pifer is the author of the award-winning debut memoir The Running Body, available from Autumn House Press. Pifer received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Wyoming and is now a PhD candidate in composition and cultural rhetoric at Syracuse University, where she holds a research fellowship and has taught courses in creative nonfiction and critical research and writing. Her...

Kyle Spencer is an investigative journalist and the author of Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America's Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power (Ecco Books). Spencer is is an award-winning journalist and frequent New York Times contributor. She has written for New York magazine, Slate, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, Politico, and many other publications. *** Otherppl...

Pete Hsu is the author of the story collection If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home, available from Red Hen Press. It is the official November pick of the Otherppl/TNB Book Club. Hsu is also the author of the experimental chapbook There Is A Man (Tolsun Books). His writing has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, The Bare Life Review, F(r)iction Magazine, Faultline Journal of Arts and Lette...

Rich Ferguson, Mary Kerr, and S.A. Griffin are the guests for a roundtable discussion of Beat literature and the new anthology Beat Not Beat: An Anthology of California Poets Screwing on the Beat and Post-Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press). Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Rich Ferguson has shared the stage with Patti Smith, Wanda Coleman, Moby, and other esteemed poets and musicians. Ferguson was sele...

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novel Flight, available from Mariner Books. Strong's other books include the novels Want and Hold Still. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper's Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Catapult and Columbia University, and in 2022-23, she will be the Visiting Fic...

Andrew Sean Greer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of the novel Less is Lost (Little, Brown), a New York Times bestseller. Greer is the author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a Today show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a...

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the debut story collection If I Survive You, available from MCD/FSG. If I Survive You is a National Book Award Nominee, an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Nominee, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and an Indie National Bestseller.  Escoffery is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowmen...

George Saunders is the author of the story collection Liberation Day, available from Random House. Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead...

Morgan Talty is the author of the debut story collection Night of the Living Rez, available from Tin House. It is the official October pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. Named one of Narrative's "30 Below 30," Talty's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere...

A.M. Homes is the author of the novel The Unfolding, available from Viking. Homes is the author of thirteen books, among them the best-selling memoir The Mistress' Daughter; the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, The End of Alice, and Jack; and the short story collections Days of Awe, The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She also writes for film and television and teaches in the Cr...

Chelsea Martin is the author of the novel Tell Me I'm an Artist, available from Soft Skull Press. Martin is the author of the essay collection Caca Dolce and the novella Mickey, among other books. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband and child. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literat...

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel Lucy by the Sea, available from Random House. Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Oh William!; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Time...

Jerry Stahl is the author of the memoir Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, available from Akashic Books. Stahl has written ten books, including the best-selling memoir Permanent Midnight, made into a movie with Ben Stiller; the essay collection OG Dad; and the novels Pain Killers; I, Fatty; Perv; Plainclothes Naked; Happy Mutant Baby...

Luke Dani Blue is the author of the debut story collection Pretend It's My Body, available from The Feminist Press. It is the official September pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. Blue’s stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and have been included on the list of the year's most distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 2016. Originally from Michigan, L...

Timothy Willis Sanders is the author of the story collection Modern Massacres (Publishing Genius). Modern Massacres is Timothy Willis Sanders’s third book and second collection of short stories. In the vein of Orange Juice (his first collection with PGP, from 2010), stories like “John Lennon,” “Officer Walter,” and “Glasses” examine contemporary life in a familiar, canny way. Humorous and full of...

Melissa Chadburn is the author of the debut novel A Tiny Upward Shove, available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Chadburn's writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, The Best American Food Writing, and many other publications. Her extensive reporting on the child welfare system appears in the Netflix docuseri...

Nada Alic is the author of the debut story collection Bad Thoughts, available from Vintage. It is the official August pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.  Alic's story "The Intruder" was shortlisted for the CBC Short Fiction Prize 2019. "My New Life" was published in No Tokens Journal. She lives in Los Angeles. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth inter...

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the author of the memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds, available from Doubleday. Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Beli...

Lynne Tillman is the author of Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence, available from Soft Skull. Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The...

Isaac Fitzgerald is the author of the memoir-in-essays Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, available from Bloomsbury. Fitzgerald appears frequently on The Today Show and is the author of the bestselling children's book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink and Knives & Ink (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Best Ameri...

David Koepp is the author of the novel Aurora, available from Harper. It is the official July pick of the TNB Book Club. Koepp has written or co-written the screenplays for more than thirty films, including Carlito's Way (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996), Panic Room (2002), Spider-Man (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)...

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novel The Great Man Theory, available from Bloomsbury. Wayne's other novels include Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for t...