Brad Listi
500 episodes listed below
Literary talk with room to wander.
Otherppl with Brad Listi sits with writers, books, and cultural arguments until the polite subject gives way to something stranger. A conversation about poems, prizes, or a novel can become a discussion of work, death, belief, media power, or the odd comedy of being alive.
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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a literary interview show that treats books as starting points rather than sealed objects. It has patience. Episodes often begin with practical context: who the guest is, what book or institution is under discussion, and why the conversation belongs in the room. Once that frame is set, the show tends to wander in the useful sense. A discussion with Ada Limón turns from poetic rhythm toward work, jobs, and the ordinary discipline required to keep writing. A conversation about PEN/Faulkner becomes a look at how awards are judged, how diversity and representation enter literary institutions, and how much structure sits behind a public honor. Replay episodes stretch the field even further. Roger McNamee talks through Facebook, Black Lives Matter surveillance, Brexit, advertising, and the machinery that rewards inflammatory politics. Andrea Bayani describes fiction as something that can grow from a misread image, a weight-loss machine, and the strange emotional logic of invention. Lorrie Moore moves from opera’s physical force to mourning, doubleness, and the architecture of a novel. Jung Yun’s episode lingers on a cruise as a pressure chamber for old wounds, secrets, family roles, and a young person’s reckoning with desire. The Ned Vizzini replay brings early success, teenage self-image, journalism, embarrassment, and mental illness into the same frame. Not every episode is hushed or literary in the same way. Some conversational stretches are blunt, skeptical, and irreverent, especially around religion, holidays, and public belief. That range is part of the show’s texture. It can be reflective without becoming solemn, funny without turning shallow, and serious about writing without sounding sealed off from ordinary life. The strongest episodes feel like someone opening a book and finding a workplace, a political system, or a bad idea that somehow became art. It is for listeners who enjoy long-form conversation, literary process, and the human complications that gather around creative work.
Made for: For readers, writers, poets, publishing-watchers, and culture-minded listeners who like conversation that moves slowly enough to find the deeper subject. It especially suits anyone interested in how books emerge from work, memory, institutions, obsession, and doubt.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its lived-in patience: it lets biography, craft, and cultural argument mingle without forcing a clean lesson. It can move from literary awards to mortality, from social media harm to fiction, and from a joke about belief to a serious question about meaning.
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly books and culture podcast featuring in-depth conversations with today's leading authors. Literature, screenwriting, the creative process, pop culture, and more. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Bluesky and Instagram.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Brad Listi's attentive questions make the structural and personal decisions behind fiction unusually easy to hear.
Otherppl with Brad Listi makes literary conversation feel less like publicity and more like an examination of choices. Listi listens for how a novel works, asking about refrains, voice, recurring patterns, confined settings, and the pressure writers place on their characters.
Brad Listi moves from fictional refrains to Facebook's machinery without making curiosity feel like homework.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear look at the work behind a poetry career.
Ada Limon and Brad Listi spend most of the conversation on the less glamorous scaffolding of a poetry life: the post-MFA years, the jobs that kept rent paid, and the habit of writing around everything else.
A clear, unsettling look at how Facebook's design and ad model amplified political harm.
The episode follows Facebook through a few concrete harms: data sold to police departments in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the Brexit campaign's anti-immigrant messaging, and an ad-driven newsfeed built to reward attention.
A funny, skeptical conversation about belief, holiday mythology, and the stories adults keep repeating.
Brad Listi steers the conversation into resurrection, the Easter bunny, and the stories adults keep telling themselves long after they stop believing them.
A grounded look at literary awards, representation, and how judging panels are assembled.
It treats the Penn Faulkner Foundation as a working case study in how literary awards are shaped, with selection, representation, and judging all given real weight.
A mistaken image leads into a patient, exact literary conversation.
Brad Listi’s replay with Andrea Bajani is a literate, low-key conversation about how a novel can begin with a mistaken image and then have to earn its own shape. Bajani talks through If You Kept a Record of Sins, the U.S.
A loose literary conversation that keeps the novel's pairs, structure, and emotional logic in view.
The opening is weighed down by sponsor copy and familiar reset language, and it takes a while to get moving. Once it settles, though, the exchange opens up into a loose literary conversation that gives Lorrie Moore room to think aloud about writing, opera, memory, and the…
A patient literary conversation that uses a half-empty cruise and Lucy's rough trip to sharpen its coming of age arc.
The episode follows a cruise-set novel and keeps coming back to the same pressure point: a half-empty ship after 9/11, with families and roommates crowded together until old faults start to show.
A flashback episode that turns teenage awkwardness, film myths, and press-party nerves into a plainspoken literary conversation.
Brad Listie returns to a conversation from episode 131, and the result is less a polished feature than a clear look at teenage awkwardness in adult rooms.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
Poetry still has a roof to keep over its head.
Facebook turns into the hard subject.
Easter gets handled from the side here.
Literary awards get practical here.
Brad Listi replays his 2021 Otherppl interview (episode 702) with Italian novelist Andrea Bajani, discussing Bajani's novel 'If You Kept a Record of Sins,' published in the US by Archipelago Books in a translation by Elizabeth Harris.
Brad Listi has never been to an opera.
It starts with a half-empty cruise.
A teal backpack tells the story.
Brad is tired.
Masculinity is messy here.
A book teaches you how to read it.
Brad begins with the practical setup: a new Tin House novel, Clutch, built around five friends and the crowded pressure of midlife.