Otherppl with Brad Listi

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

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

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

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

Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree are the guests. Their new story collection, Our Secret Life in the Movies, is now available from A Strange Object. The Washington Post says "This beautiful, devastating little book is quite unlike anything else I've ever encountered, and if you grew up in a small town in the 1980s feeling even remotely marginal, it's specifically engineered to break your heart." And the BBC calls it "Brilliant." Monologue topics: the move, exhaustion, the new home studio, schedule changes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Bushnell is the guest. His latest poetry collection is called OHSO, and it's available now from Scrambler Books. Scott McClanahan says "OHSO is revolutionary. It has seen death. Mike Bushnell is a ghost of the classics." And Beach Sloth says "Mike Bushnell is a tornado of a person. Everything around him gets sucked into his vortex. What comes out are some of the single best lines I have encountered. The energy he possesses with live readings translates extremely well into the written word. OHSO has been a long time a coming but thank goodness it is finally here." Monologue topics:  moving, schedule changes.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dmitry Samarov is the guest. His new memoir, Where To?, is now available from Curbside Splendor.  Rick Kogan calls it "Funny, touching, observant, philosophical, sad, world-weary, artful and wonderful are the stories that pepper this book. There has never been a cab driver like Dmitry Samarov and, since he's given up for keeps late-night for-hire driving, there never will be." And Wendy MacNaughton says "With his gorgeous pen and ink drawings and funny, tragic, and all too true stories, Samarov's chronicle of his adventures as a Chicago taxi driver is by far the best ride you'll ever take in a cab." Monologue topics:  mail, recent episodes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dorothea Lasky is the guest. Her latest poetry collection, Rome, is available now from Liveright.  Maggie Nelson says “Dorothea Lasky is one of the very best poets we've got. Her poems radiate weirdness and raw power; you can feel your mind grow new folds as you read them. They lay waste to milquetoast notions of poetic longing or melancholy, and instead go in for the vibrating, bloody facts of sadness, anger, desire, bare life, all returned to us more intensely, strangely, and sometimes comedically, by her words. The line is Lasky's measure, and she wields it like an axe she's been carrying through several lifetimes, that kind of wisdom. Her Rome is huge and intrepid and perfect, a total gift.” And Fanny Howe says “Rome is a trip with the wheels engaged to land at every line ending, then flipped up again. A wholly open-hearted book bringing me back to Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen and the suffragettes. True life.” Monologue topics:  holiday gift ideas, support the show, Dorothea reads a poem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Giraldi is the guest. His latest novel, Hold the Dark, is now available from Liveright Publishing. The New York Times Book Review calls it “[F]ierce, extraordinary…. Hold the Dark is an unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone awry. It’s all but bereft of levity, spectacularly violent and exquisitely written.” And the Boston Globe says “Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s Boston writer William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction… [Hold the Dark] certainly stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership.” Monologue topics: holiday gift ideas, the holidays, capitalist orgies, bad attitudes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Atticus Lish is the guest. His debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, is available now from Tyrant Books.  It is the official November selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. The New York Times calls it “Perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.” And Joy Williams says "So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. Preparation for the Next Life is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book." Monologue topics: TNB Book Club, mail, transcribing this podcast, Dear Sugar, advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices