Mike DeCapite is the author of the novel Jacket Weather, available from Soft Skull Press.

 

DeCapite’s other books include the novel Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog, published under the banner of Sparkle Street Books. Cuz Editions published his story “Sitting Pretty,” later anthologized in The Italian American Reader.

DeCapite grew up in Cleveland and has lived in London and San Francisco, but has spent most of his time in New York City, where he now resides.

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

@otherppl

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Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Lucie Elven is the author of the debut novel The Weak Spot, available from Soft Skull Press.

 

Elven has written for publications including The London Review of Books, Granta, and NOON. She is the former deputy editor of The Believer magazine, and The Weak Spot is her first book. She lives in London.

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Life. Death. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

@otherppl

Instagram

YouTube

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Leigh Stein is the guest. Her new poetry collection, What to Miss When, is available from Soft Skull.

 

Stein is the author of five books including the novel Self Care and the poetry collection Dispatch from the Future. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Allure, ELLE, The Cut, Salon, and Slate. She is a recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and The Cut named her poet laureate of The Bachelor.

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Life. Death. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

@otherppl

Instagram

YouTube

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Photo credit: Brian Jacks Lores.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum. His new essay collection, Figure It Out, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 
Koestenbaum has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation,and Jackie Under My Skin. His essays and poems have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Cabinet, and Artforum. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art’s painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Nicolette Polek. Her new story collection, Imaginary Museums, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 

Polek is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio and is a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Elaine Kahn. She is a writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles. Her new poetry collection, Romance or The End, is available from Soft Skull.

 

Kahn’s other book is called Women in Public (City Lights, 2015). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BFA from California College of the Arts. And she teaches at the Poetry Field School.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Fiona Alison Duncan. Her debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa, is available from Soft Skull Press.

Duncan is a Canadian-American artist, writer and organizer. She is the founding host of Hard to Read, a lit series, and Pillow Talk, community organizing on sex, love and communication. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Elvia Wilk. Her debut novel, Oval, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 

Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She contributes to publications like Frieze, Mousse, Metropolis, Artforum, and Zeit Online. From 2012 to 2016 she was a founding editor at uncube magazine and from 2016 to 2018 she was the publications editor for transmediale. She is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal and is finishing a masters at the New School for Social Research. She has taught at the University of the Arts Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Leah Dieterich. Her debut memoir, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage, is available from Soft Skull Press.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Maggie Nelson . She is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including The Argonauts, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, The Red Parts, and Jane: A Murder. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction and in 2016 was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Most recently, her poetry collection Something Bright, Then Holes, has been re-issued by Soft Skull Press.

This is Maggie’s second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 185 on June 23, 2013.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Lynne Tillman. Her new novel, Men and Apparitions, is available from Soft Skull Press.

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Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Chelsea Martin. Her new essay collection, Caca Dolce, is available from Soft Skull Press.

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Over the weekend of June 25, 2016 at the Bronx zoo, two separate individuals were arrested for trespassing after they crossed posted boundaries and entered two exhibits separately—the  snow leopard and red panda. One of them, a reporter for the New York Post, was just trying to get some good pictures for a story. On May 28, not even a month earlier, a four-year-old boy slipped away from his mother and fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo, and the tragic ending to this story suddenly made everyone in America an expert on parenting, gorilla behavior, and zoo design.

While troubling and often shocking, these stories are hardly new. Instead, they partake in a long history of sublime and violent encounters between humans and zoo animals, a history that resists easy explanations and online punditry, a history that repeats itself.

You are the man who sang “God Bless the Magyar” after we lost the war. I watched you sway by a bullet-pocked door, heard you testing the national anthem’s loose notes, a lost war’s afterthoughts. I hadn’t heard it since school, and then school was called off. All up and down Saint Matyas Street, wind chased your song among tattered banners and plackards and flags. Elms cast their shadows on smashed cobblestones, windowsills lined with wash. A corpse swayed against a streetlight in accompaniment, its belt buckle clinking the pole, red-checked shirt cheery against the dull sky. Its urgent clogged smell permeated the air, the sad clothes on clotheslines.

To read Frank Browning’s latest book The Monk and the Skeptic: Dialogues on Sex, Faith, and Religion is to eavesdrop on series of confessionals, and to be party to the converse positions and erotic agreements of Browning and Brother Peter, a homosexual Dominican monk, a relationship that begins in kitsch surroundings that Jean Paul Gaultier might want to rip off. It is to enter a rich demimonde frocked in drag and incense, at times sensuous and melancholy, at others cavalier and threaded with paradox. The confessions leak from the ecclesiastical to the secular world, revealing the sexual wounds of the Catholic church, the often painful duality required of gay men within the institution. The relationship between Browning and Brother Peter is—in all senses—touching. The Monk and the Skeptic is a remarkable book, full of yearning and transcendence. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to correspond with Frank about his book and to have him elaborate further on some of the questions arising from it. Since then, Time magazine has named Pope Francis ‘Person of the Year,’ an accolade about which I suspect we would both remain skeptical.