Good news! The editors at McSweeney’s have included Other People in the latest edition of their ‘McSweeney’s Recommends’ column. Some very kind words about the show:
My thanks to the folks at McSweeney’s!
And: humbling to have the show compared to WTF. Marc Maron is brilliant. If you’re not listening to him, something’s wrong with you.
-BL
Alexander Maksik is the guest. One of the original writers at The Nervous Breakdown, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow.
He’s now the author of You Deserve Nothing, one of the most buzzed-about novels of the fall season. It’s available from Tonga Books, an imprint of Europa Editions.
We get into it.
Topics of conversation include: book tour, wayward youth, Australia, lost cause love affairs, Andy Warhol, Lycra biking shorts, method acting, teaching, Brooklyn, pizza delivery, body waxing, Bill Paxton, Planet Hollywood, Paris, Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, exhaustion resulting from the complete dismantling of a fantasy, Craig’s List, Alice Sebold, Spain, luck, persistence, Iowa, Top Gun, Ketchum, the future, and more.
Don’t forget: Subscribe at iTunes (free!). Subscribe at Stitcher (free!). Or, if you’d like, just push PLAY below, or just download straight to your desktop. Etcetera.
Thank you!
-BL
PS. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Email me at letters [at] otherpeoplepod [dot] com.
Such a great pleasure to have Steve Almond on the show. His new story collection, God Bless America, is due out from Lookout Books on October 25th. Lorrie Moore calls it “funny and beguiling and completely original.”
Wanna buy it now? Go straight to the publisher. And of course it’ll be available where books are sold on 10/25.
Steve is a great talker, has a great brain, writes beautifully. We cover a lotta ground.
Topics of conversation include: communes, Jennifer Egan, too much television, nauseating self-doubt, anxiousness over books one hasn’t read, the absurdity of continuing to write even though writing is often miserable, high class problems, the scarcity of attention, Charles Dickens, hamsters eating carrots, the god-awful guilt one feels when one realizes that one is complaining about the difficulty of writing in a world where most people don’t have access to potable water, the phrase “God Bless America,” Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, and more.
Listen here. Listen via Stitcher. Or subscribe at iTunes. It’s all free.
Thanks, everybody.
-BL
PS. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Email me: letters@otherpeoplepod.com
Victoria Patterson is the guest. She’s the author of two books, both set in the moneyed coastal regions of Orange County, California.
The first is the story collection Drift, which was a finalist for both the California Book Award and the Story Prize. And the second his her acclaimed debut novel, This Vacant Paradise, which was hailed far and wide by a variety of publications, including the New York Times.
And just yesterday, the OC Weekly named her Best Author in its annual ‘Best of’ edition. (Congrats to Tory!)
Listen to the show:
-At iTunes
-At Stitcher
-At the official website of Other People
It’s all free. All the time.
Go get it.
-BL
The guest is Blake Butler, critically acclaimed author of the novel There is No Year and the new memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia.
You can listen to the show, free of charge, at the Other People website.
Or you can subscribe for free at iTunes.
Or at Stitcher.
FREE!
Jessica and I, in conversation. She’s an author. She writes novels.
Episode 4 - Ron Currie, Jr. is now live.
Ron is the acclaimed author of the story collection God is Dead and the novel Everything Matters! He is the recipient of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Metcalf award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He’s a good one.
-BL
And here we have Other People - Episode 3. My conversation with Emma Straub, rising star author of Flyover State (a novella), Other People We Married (a story collection), and the forthcoming debut novel Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, which will be published by Riverhead Press.
Just click that blue link to listen to Emma. She’s a goodie.
Other People - Episode 2 is now live. The sneak preview phase continues.
Click the link. Push PLAY. Listen to my interview with Melissa Febos, whose acclaimed memoir Whip Smart details the years she spent as a professional dominatrix, heroin addict and straight-A college student, among other things…
