Lesley Arfin is the guest. She was a staff writer on the first two seasons of the hit television show Girls, starring Lena Dunham, and she also writes for the MTV series Awkward. Her book, Dear Diary, is based on a column of the same name that originally appeared in Vice magazine. It was published by Vice Books/MTV Press in 2007.

Listen here:

Subscribe for free at iTunes. Get the free official app.

Ben Brooks, author of Grow Up, says

I read these poems three times in one night, then put the duvet over my head and held my knees for a while. It’s good when something makes sense. I really really liked these poems.

**Please note: As an ‘addendum’ to this episode, you can hear a ~34-minute, exclusive, late-nite conversation with Megan Boyle, Mira Gonzalez and a guy named Sam by becoming a premium subscriber.

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

To learn more about the app and how to get access to premium content, please click right here.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Or just push PLAY below…

Terry Tempest Williams is the guest. She is the author of several books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her latest book is called When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. It was published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2012, and the paperback edition is due out from Picador on February 26, 2013.

The San Francisco Chronicle raves

Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions….As the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it become a full-fledged aria.

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Listen here:

Michael Robbins is the guest. His debut poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator, was named one of the best books of 2012 by The New York Times, Slate, Commonweal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and The Millions.

Dwight Garner of the The New York Times says

Mr. Robbins’s heart is not lovely but beating a bit arrhythmically; not dark but lighted by a dangling disco ball; not deep but as shallow and alert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami. Yet it’s a heart crammed full, like a goose’s liver, with pagan grace. This man can write.

Monologue topics: Patrick Swayze, tweets, drones.

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Listen here:

Photo credit: Clayton Hauck | Chicago Reader

Move the mouse or scroll your iPad screen to the space at the close of Amazon.com “Editorial Reviews” section for Daniel Levin Becker’s excellent Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard UP 2012).

There, you’ll find a repetition of the “Book Description,” from earlier in the page, now inflected with all-too-common Amazon character errors:

The youngest member of the Paris-based experimental collective Oulipo, Levin Becker tells the story of one of literature’s quirkiest movements—and the personal quest that led him to seek out like-minded writers, artists, and scientists who are obsessed with language and games, and who embrace formal constraints to achieve literature’s potential.

“’s” is html code for a right singly quote, and “&mdash,” of course, is the em dash (—). These reverse-engineered impregnations of the Descrption are certainly errors, but also candy-store windows for those who take a sly delight in the structural underpinning of how words on a web page may be “put” there, so to speak, in the first place.

Joyce Johnson is the guest. She is the author of several books, the most recent of which is called The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, available now from Viking.

Kirkus calls it

An exemplary biography of the Beat icon and his development as a writer…Johnson [turns] a laser-sharp focus on Kerouac’s evolving ideas about language, fiction vs. truth and the role of the writer in his time…there’s plenty of life in these pages to fascinate casual readers, and Johnson is a sensitive but admirably objective biographer. A triumph of scholarship.

Also in this episode: Joshua Mohr, author of the novel Fight Song, now available from Soft Skull Press. Fight Song is the February selection of The TNB Book Club. Publishers Weekly calls it “an interesting mix of Charles Bukowski and Tom Robbins, with a cinematic heaping of the Coen brothers for good measure.”

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Listen here:

Please explain what just happened.

I banged my knee on the computer desk, and I’m now in pain. But I’ve recovered nicely by the time I finished this sentence. Nope…still hurts.

What is your earliest memory?

Earliest memory would be me dressing up in my mothers nylons and pretending I’m Batman. I WISH I was making this up.

If you weren’t an actor, what other profession would you choose?

If I wasn’t an actor I’d be a professional break-dancer who also dabbled in graffiti. Legal graffiti of course…

James Lasdun is the guest. He is the author of two novels, four collections of poetry, and two collections of short stories, including the collection The Siege, the title story of which was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged). With Jonathan Nossiter he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgaard. His new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, is a memoir published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

J.M. Coetzee raves

Give Me Everything You Have is a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.

Listen here:

San Diego City Beat has reviewed the Other People with Brad Listi podcast:

What matters to Listi is insight and inspiration. He wants to know how they got their start as writers, what they were like in college, what obstacles they overcame. Listi doesn’t dance around his subjects. Were you a fuck-up? A prodigy? A jerk? Eventually, even the most reticent writer opens up. The result is something that book culture usually is not—lively, timely and incredibly entertaining.

Matthew Salesses is the guest. He is the author of two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get, a novella called The Last Repatriate, and his new novel is called I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms).

Also in this episode: a conversation with Reality Hunger author David Shields. His new book, How Literature Saved My Life, is now availalble from Knopf. And later this year, in September, he will publish The Private War of J.D. Salinger, co-authored by Shane Salerno.

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Or just listen here:

Everything young adult novelist Sean Beaudoin writes is cutting-edge, fast-moving, and fun. If you haven’t read his first three books (Going Nowhere Faster; Fade to Blue; and You Killed Wesley Payne) you’ll probably want to after you devour his newest book, The Infects. The Infects is funny, thrilling and suspenseful. And, best of all, it features zombies! Here are Six Sex Questions for Sean Beaudoin:

20. Mud

DIRECTOR: Jeff Nichols

CAST: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Paulson, Sam Shepard and Michael Shannon

RELEASE DATE: TBD

Take Shelter writer/director Jeff Nichols continues his string of ominous Southern parables, and McConaughey continues his string of challenging and interesting work, with the story of two young boys who befriend a fugitive.

Kate Zambreno is the guest. She is the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl, and her latest book is a critical memoir called Heroines, now available from Semiotext(e).

Bitch magazine calls it

A brave, enlightening, and brutally honest historical inquiry that will leave readers with an urgent desire to tell their own stories.

Also in this episode: A conversation with Ron Currie, Jr., whose new novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking | February 2013) is the January selection of the TNB Book Club.

Listen here:

It would’ve been easier to write a list called “The Only 3 Movies I Won’t See in 2013,” but that wouldn’t have done anybody any good. So instead I made an entirely subjective list of 40 reasons why I think this will be an amazing year for film. Missing are big films that I’m just not that enthusiastic about (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Man of Steel), films that would be on the list if it weren’t for the director’s last film being a total letdown (e.g. Ridley Scott’s The Counselor; thanks a lot, Prometheus!), and films that would be on the list had I written it any other day (sorry, The East, Lowlife, and Kill Your Darlings). For the most part, the order is arbitrary. However, the top five are set in stone, and if I could only watch one movie this year it would be the film at number one.

So, without any further ado…