Otherppl with Brad Listi

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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Crispy and others. She teaches creative writing and is based in Los Angeles, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Brad 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. He lives in Los Angeles.This is Duke's second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 36on January 18, 2012. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the New 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices