This episode first aired on March 27, 2013.

It is being reposted in memory of Giancarlo DiTrapano (1974-2021), founder and publisher of Tyrant Books. He died unexpectedly on March 30 in New York City. No official cause of death has been reported as of yet.

I didn’t know Gian well, but I did know him a bit. He was always kind, always memorable. One of the few true originals out there, and certainly an original in the world of publishing. He did very good work and helped shepherd the publication of books that will far outlive him. He made a positive difference in the world.

My heartfelt condolences to his friends and family. He will be greatly missed.

-BL

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Megan Boyle. Her novel LIVEBLOG is available from Tyrant Books.

This is Megan’s second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 13 on October 30, 2011.

She is also the author of selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee (Muumuu House, 2011). Her writing has appeared in Vice, the Believer, Thought Catalog, and other places online and in print. She has been liveblogging her life since March 17, 2020 on her Tumblr. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Shane Jones. His latest novel, Vincent and Alice and Alice, is available from Tyrant Books. It is the official August pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Shane’s second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 301 on August 6, 2014.

Jones’ other books include the novels Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters.

He lives in Albany, New York.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Steve Anwyll. His debut novel, Welfare, is available from Tyrant Books.

Anwyll’s work has appeared in Hobart and Tyrant Magazine, among other places. He lives in Montreal.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Brad Phillips. His new story collection, Essays and Fictions, is available from Tyrant Books.

The late Anthony Bourdain calls it: “Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing. [Phillips] peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul.”

Born in 1974, Phillips is also an accomplished visual artist  known for dark work that engages with themes of eroticism, depression, and mortality. His paintings display stylistic breadth, from text-based to photorealist, referring in many cases directly to his daily life. He lives in Toronto.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Mark Leidner. His new story collection, Under the Sea, is available from Tyrant Books.

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Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Scott McClanahan. His new novel The Sarah Book is now available from Tyrant Books. It is the official July pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Scott’s second appearance on the program. He was the guest in Episode 87 on July 15, 2012.

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In 2011, when she was 21, Marie Calloway posted a long piece on her Tumblr about a sexual encounter she had with an older male writer whom she met online.  The post immediately attracted attention, and it was republished on Muumuu House with the name of the man and the story changed to Adrien Brody. The link spread far and wide. The story and the author, often conflated into one subject, were discussed, derided, analyzed, and defended on many major cultural web sites (including The Nervous Breakdown) as well as on scores—maybe hundreds, maybe thousands—of blogs. In these conversations, Marie Calloway became a stand-in for many things—the ethics of writing about real people, the impact of writing personally about sex as a pretty young woman, the internet in general and its affect on Art and Literature. She’d sometimes pop up on comment boards and deflate or deflect some of the weight being placed on this one story.

“Now our unraveling for evenings and the columns of the replicating bell, a cord of child milk rising in pink glisten for the city lamp and making every person see themselves before themselves with tubes removed, the index of the body bopped with big sheathes of silver foiling, catching words where there were words, though there were very few…”

I panicked at the opening pages of Sky Saw (Tyrant Books / Dec. 2012), which are filled with this dense, complicated language, fearing Blake Butler would hold me hostage for the novel’s duration in a swamp of unclarified narrative, a poetic mire that, while beautiful in its bruising, wouldn’t lead me forward through a story. But then Sky Saw opened like the mold-blooms of his previous works, and there was a narrative to wrap my eyes around, and the book held me captive in a completely different way.

Released in early 2012 from Tyrant Books–the brainchild that brought us Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg, Eugene Marten’s Firework, and Michael Kimball’s Us–Atticus Lish’s Life Is with People is a sketchbook drawn through a poetic gloryhole. It is a violent, raging, and brutal book, yet also houses subtle moments of massive and quiet weight. But what is Life Is with People? In a recent posting on Vice, Tyrant kingpin Giancarlo DiTrapano described it this way: