- 1 hour 13 minutes1053. Mark Leidner
Mark Leidner is the author of the poetry collection Elegy for Pangaea, available from Fonograf Editions.
Leidner's previous poetry collections are Returning the Sword to the Stone (Fonograf Editions, 2021), Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011), and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator/Two Dollar Radio, 2011). He also wrote the story collection Under the Sea (Tyrant Books, 2018), called "virtuosic" by the New York Times. One of the stories from that collection, "21 Extremely Bad Breakups," won the 2015 Newfound Prose Prize and in 2018 was adapted for the stage by Amy Rummenie of the Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Mark also wrote and produced the 2019 feature-length sci-fi thriller Empathy, Inc., which earned rave reviews in Variety, The AV Club, and The Verge and is available on streaming platforms. Mark is a graduate of the University of Georgia, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Tifton, GA and now lives in northern California.
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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
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8 September 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 12 minutesJonathan Franzen on Fame, Techno-Optimism, and David Foster Wallace
Today on the program, a trip into the archive and a return to Episode 426, my conversation with Jonathan Franzen. We were talking about his novel Purity, available in trade paperback from Picador.
Air date: August 10, 2016
Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, including Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
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Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
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6 September 2026, 8:08 am - 18 minutes 34 secondsExcerpt from 'All That Is Left of Life,' by Roberta Recchia
Vol. 17 of Story Time, featuring an author reading aloud from her work. In this episode, Roberta Recchia reads from her bestselling debut novel All That Is Left of Life (Scribner).
Born in Rome in 1972, Roberta Rossella Recchia lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
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5 September 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 5 minutesIs It Illegal to Smell Someone in California?
Volume 103 of Brad & Mira For the Culture...Mira issues a correction after spreading misinformation about Johnny Carson and Porter Wagoner...Mira gets a new tattoo...the Otherppl podcast is about to turn 15....Brad lands a huge interview...Angry Adam is AWOL...the Tom Cruise nostalgia tour continues...Days of Thunder 2 is in the works...Anne Hathaway to co-star...Randy Quaid weighs in...Hunter Biden appears on yet another podcast...reports that Joe visited him in his crack den in the presidential motorcade...met a homeless crack addict named Bicycles...the serial Butt Sniffer of California strikes again...Mira begrudgingly absolves Bill Maher and Mel Gibson...Dolly Parton's 100th birthday song...& more...
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
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Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
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3 September 2026, 8:08 am - 56 minutes 21 seconds1052. Marlon James
Marlon James is the author of the novel The Disappearers, now available from Riverhead Books. It has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.
James is the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Brief History of Seven Killings; the bestselling and National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; as well as the bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; The Book of Night Women; and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, James’s novels have won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, and have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and named in 2019 one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world, James lives in New York City.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
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1 September 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 14 minutesREPLAY: Terry Tempest Williams on Grief, Art, Absence, and Presence
Today on the program, a trip into the archive and a return to Episode 149, my conversation with Terry Tempest Williams. We were talking about her book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, available from Picador.
Air date: February 17, 2013.
Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of over twenty books of creative nonfiction, including the environmental classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Among her other books are Leap; Red; The Open Space of Democracy; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; The Hour of Land; and Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Her work has been translated and anthologized worldwide. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Southeastern Utah.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
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30 August 2026, 8:08 am - 20 minutes 39 secondsExcerpt from 'Earth 7,' by Deb Olin Unferth
Vol. 16 of Story Time, featuring an author reading aloud from her work. In this episode, Deb Olin Unferth reads from her new novel, Earth 7, now available from Graywolf Press.
Deb is the author of six books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
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29 August 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 21 minutesDolly Parton 4Ever
Volume 102 of Brad & Mira For the Culture...Dolly Parton, our Lord & Savior, has shuffled off her mortal coil...Mira laments not being able to cancel the podcast for mental health reasons...Mira ridicules Brad for not marketing his podcast until year 15...Brad's Instagram following explodes...Angry Adam is furious again...does James Blunt have micro-penis?...Harry & Meghan heading back to the UK...Clavicular's security detail brawls with college kids in Ft. Lauderdale...Sydney Sweeney is the next Tom Cruise...the Iranian government puts a bounty on Barron...& more...
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com
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27 August 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 12 minutes1051. Roberta Recchia
Roberta Recchia is the author of the debut novel All That is Left of Life, available from Scribner. Translated by Antonella Lettieri.
Born in Rome in 1972, Roberta Rossella Recchia lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy.
Antonella Lettieri is a London-based translator with over ten years of experience working in English and Italian. She was the 2023 NCW Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and was awarded first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation.
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Today's episode is brought to you by Rula. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit www.rula.com/otherppl to get started.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com
The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
25 August 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 37 minutesREPLAY: Madelaine Lucas on Love, Longing, and the Art of the Sad, Horny Novel
Today on the program, a trip into the archive and a return to Episode 822, my conversation with Madelaine Lucas, author of the debut novel Thirst for Salt (Tin House).
Air date: March 19, 2023.
Lucas is formerly a senior editor of NOON, and she is a graduate of Columbia University. She lives in Australia.
***
Today's episode is brought to you by Rula. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit www.rula.com/otherppl to get started.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com
The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.
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23 August 2026, 8:08 am - 1 hour 17 minutes1050. Beowulf Sheehan
Beowulf Sheehan is the author of The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy (Autofocus Books).
Sheehan is a photographer of figures in the arts and humanities. To date, he's photographed better than 1,000 writers from more than 60 countries. His work has been published in the likes of Elle, Esquire, L’Uomo Vogue, The New Yorker, People, Time, Vanity Fair, and Vogue and has been exhibited at institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dostoevsky Museum, International Center of Photography, Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Witliff Colelctions. Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan, a collection of portraits of 200 writers from 35 countries with a foreword by Salman Rushdie, was published in 2018. The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy is Sheehan's second monograph. Beowulf Sheehan is the proud son of an immigrant and translator, grandson of a poet and photographer, grandson of a copy editor, first cousin once removed from an editor, and cousin, first cousin once removed, and great-great-nephew of authors. Raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he lives in New York City.
***
Today's episode is brought to you by Rula. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit www.rula.com/otherppl to get started.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Get How to Write a Novel, the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors.
Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter.
Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com
The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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