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Your Book is Ready When It's Ready, with Brad Listi
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About the episode:
Today’s guest on TBIHTW is Brad Listi, best known as the creator of the OTHERPPL with Brad Listi podcast. Hailed by everyone from The New Yorker to Electric Literature as a go-to literary podcast, OTHERPPL boasts over 770+ episodes, making it also one of the longest running literary podcasts as well.
Brad Listi’s new book, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, is a work of autofiction which follows a middle-aged LA writer and podcaster (also called Brad Listi) who grapples with life in Los Angeles, the meaning of adulthood and marriage, along with a series of very challenging events including the death of a close friend, several miscarriages, and raising a child with disabilities.
Despite the premise, the book is poised, generous, and funny, partly because the narrator is so open about describing the challenges he has with finishing his book. In real life, it took Brad over 12 years, and many different versions, to finally land on the book he had to write.
He has a lot to say about that journey, about not forgetting your the reader, about the lessons of creative failure, and what it takes to finish a book.
Brad’s other books include the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder., an LA Times bestseller, and Board, a work of nonfiction collage, co-authored with Justin Benton. He is the founding editor of The Nervous Breakdown, an online literary magazine.
Discussed on the episode
Be Brief and Tell Them Everything – available from Bookshop | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Steve Almond Interviews Brad Listi on OTHERPPL
Cynthia Ozick’s essay, “A Drugstore In Winter” (originally published in the NYT, later collected in Art & Ardor)
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Credits
This episode was edited by Paul Zakrzewski and produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions.
Get full access to The Book I Want to Write at bookiwanttowrite.substack.com/subscribe
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