Podcast appearances and mentions of fiona maazel

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 2, 2020 is: pediculous • pih-DIK-yuh-lus • adjective : infested with lice : lousy Examples: All of the campers in the cabin had to be checked for lice when one boy’s sleeping bag was discovered to be pediculous. "They say pediculous humors and flyborne air are culprits of plague, so the townsmen make a pyre of flowers and brush, attar and spikenard, by way of purging the air of offense." — Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance, 2008 Did you know? Count on the English language's Latin lexical options to pretty up the unpleasant. You can have an entire conversation about lice and avoid the l-word entirely using pediculous and its relatives. None of the words (from pediculus, meaning "louse") is remotely common, but they're all available to you should you feel the need for them. There's pediculosis, meaning "infestation with lice," pedicular, "of or relating to lice," and pediculoid, "resembling or related to the common lice." Pediculid names a particular kind of louse—one of the family Pediculidae. And if you'd like to put an end to all of this you might require a pediculicide—defined as "an agent for destroying lice."

Has the internet documented everything? This week we explore its lacunae and unmoderated chat rooms and the ways we might slip away from the public identities we create online and in the media. Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers, writes a novel live online, each word as he types it visible to the spectators of a raucous unmoderated chatroom funneling Reddit-grade hate speech into the margins of the author's screen as he types, completing the novel in just five days. MF Doom, who raps while wearing a steel gladiator mask, began sending other rappers—known as Doomposters, or MF Dupes—to headline his own shows. We investigate MF Doom's slippery approach to identity and its relation to black performance art in conjunction with the Believer magazine's return to the newsstands. “My idea of advanced technology is a toilet seat whose trajectory from up to down takes so long to complete, I can pluck my unibrow while waiting for it to happen.” Zoe Lister-Jones, writer, director, and star of the new film Band Aid performs short fiction from novelist Fiona Maazel, explores the nascent form of the podcast from a 4 am toilet seat in a retirement home with stops along the way for eating disorders, evasive children, and the sinking feeling of disappearing from reality. Throughout this week's episode you'll hear a catalog of unclaimed URLs from artist and writer Brian McMullen. “Kittenlawyer.com, specialgrandson.com, coolgrandson.com, supergrandson.com, bestgrandsonever.com, cocainegalaxy.com, cocaineuniverse.com, cocainery.com, badassperson.com, decentemployer.com, decentemployee.com, splendidsex.com, sexaintbad.com, abolishsex.com…”

Fiona Maazel is author of the novels A Little More Human (2017), Woke Up Lonely (2013); and Last Last Chance (2008). Maazel is winner of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Bard Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories 2017. She has taught in the creative writing programs at Brooklyn College, NYU, Adelphi, Princeton, Syracuse, Columbia, and the University of Leipzig, Germany, and is currently the Director of Communications for a legal nonprofit, Measures for Justice. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In early July, LARB invited Lorin Stein, the Editor in Chief of the Paris Review, to speak at its publishing workshop at USC. During the trip, he also joined LARB's Tom Lutz for a public dialogue on the state of publishing, books, journals, reading, and literature - which naturally flowed into an even wider range of subjects from the joy of print, the craft of editing, translation in the digital age, Michael Houellebecq, and the marvelous writing of Edouard Louis. Also, author Fiona Maazel, who's new book is A Little More Human, returns to recommend Jim Shepard's new collection of stories The World To Come.

LARB Radio's Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, Eric Newman spoke with authors Joyce Carol Oates, Morgan Parker, and Fiona Maazel at this year's LA Times Bookfest held recently on the USC campus. Morgan Parker is the author of There are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce. Fiona Maazel's latest novel is A Little More Human. Joyce Carol Oates remains one of the leading figures in contemporary American letters, a status she has held for many decades. All three reflect on their writing processes, on contemporary literature and culture, as well as our troubled political times.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Picador) Adelle Waldman, whose novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. has been on our bestseller list for months, discusses her book with film director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man). A debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the romantic life of a brilliant young man. Writer Nate Piven's star is rising. After several lean and striving years, he has his pick of both magazine assignments and women: Juliet, the hotshot business reporter; Elisa, his gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; and Hannah, "almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice," who holds her own in conversation with his friends. When one relationship grows more serious, Nate is forced to consider what it is he really wants. In Nate's 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a flawed, sometimes infuriating modern man--one who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down in ways that may just make him an emblem of our times. With tough-minded intelligence and wry good humor The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is an absorbing tale of one young man's search for happiness--and an inside look at how he really thinks about women, sex and love. Praise for The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.: "Deliciously funny, sharply observed, elegantly told, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is the best debut I've encountered in years, the best novel about New York, and the best novel about contemporary manhood and the crazy state of gender roles and just "contemporary" life. With a pitch perfect balance of satire and sympathy, reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, and Jay McInerney'sBrightness Falls, Adelle Waldman's voice is nevertheless entirely--and unabashedly--her own." --Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of the novel A Fortunate Age "Novelist Adelle Waldman does a very tricky thing: she succeeds in crossing the gender line, imagining the world from behind the eyes of a male character both sympathetically and unsentimentally. This former young-literary-man-in-Brooklyn found himself cringing in recognition." --William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter "I can't remember the last novel this good about being young and smart and looking for love in the big city. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. reads as if one of the top tier 19th-century novelists zeroed her social x-ray eyes onto present-moment Brooklyn. Up-and-coming writers and artists everywhere will be squirming with uncomfortable recognition of themselves, their friends, and their psyches; far more readers will be thanking Adelle Waldman for this hilarious, big-hearted, ruthlessly intelligent, and ridiculously well-written novel." --Charles Bock, author of the best-selling novel Beautiful Children ""Bracing and astute. Waldman writes these crisp, smart sentences that are every bit as thoughtful as her characters--people whose relationships founder and flourish in ways that will captivate readers from page one." --Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance and "Woke Up Lonely Adelle Waldman is the author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband. Filmmaker Marc Webb most recently directed The Amazing Spider-Man 2, after helming the critically acclaimedThe Amazing Spider-Man which grossed over $750 million worldwide. Webb will direct the third installment in the series, The Amazing Spider-Man 3, scheduled for release in 2018. Webb made his feature film debut with the two-time Golden Globe nominated (500) Days of Summer for which he received The National Board of Review's Spotlight Award, recognizing outstanding directorial debuts.

Forest of Fortune (Tyrus Books) Skylight Books is very excited to welcome Vermin on the Mount's very own, Jim Ruland! Something's not right at Thunderclap Casino… While working the floor at the casino on the ultra-rural Yukemaya Indian Reservation, Alice is visited by a mysterious woman. Alice wants to believe her new epilepsy meds are causing her to hallucinate, but the apparition keeps coming back with terrifying information about the reservation's secret history. Pemberton, a hard-partying copywriter from L.A. who was kicked out of his apartment by his fiancé, is having a difficult time adjusting to life on the rez. His new boss at the casino has severe anger-management issues, his drinking is getting out of control, and he's attracted the attention of a drug-addled biker. Lupita is no stranger to casinos, but she's never seen anything like this: a slot machine that compels people to keep playing until they've lost everything. Lupita's been on been on bad runs before, but this machine is different. This one is evil. As the three of them come to terms with the ways in which they are haunted by the past and struggle to turn their luck around, they must confront the malevolent force at Thunderclap that won't rest until old wrongs have been made right. Praise for Forest of Fortune “Forest of Fortune captures the soul and voice of hard-luck, hard-living Americans in a way that conjures up earlier masters like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. Jim Ruland has an uncanny ability to get inside his characters – the small-time gamblers, washed up ad-men, and ladies of a certain age with a taste for one-armed bandits who people the casino at the center of the novel, the aptly named ‘Thunderclap.' It's been a long time since I've read an author with this much heart and talent. I really loved this book.”–Jerry Stahl, author of Happy Mutant Baby Pills andPermanent Midnight “A little spooky, very funny, and thoroughly engrossing from start to finish. Ruland writes with real aplomb and takes no prisoners.”—Fiona Maazel, author of Woke Up Lonely “Jim Ruland's debut novel Forest of Fortune celebrates casino luck, mostly bad. A tour de force about a casino's back rooms and environs, Forest of Fortune delivers on the seductive hardboiled territory of dread and despair. I'd bet plenty that you'll like this.”—Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl “Beguiling, nimble, and wonderfully weird, The Forest of Fortune is an out-of-left-field gem.”—Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers “American culture is now casino culture, as anyone with a mortgage or student loan or 401(k) knows all too well. Jim Ruland's terrific novel gets to the heart of the matter, his characters struggling mightily to keep their heads above water, to find something better, something more, in all the wrong places. Smart, honest, darkly funny, Forest of Fortune is a powerful debut from a writer of real talent.”—Scott O'Connor, author of The Untouchable and Half World Jim Ruland is a Navy veteran, former Indian casino employee, and author of the short story collection Big Lonesome. He is the host of Vermin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series based in Southern California. He is a columnist for the indie music zine Razorcake and writes "The Floating Library," a books column, for San Diego CityBeat. His work has been published in The Believer, Esquire, Hobart, Granta, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's, Oxford American and elsewhere. Ruland's awards include a fellowship from the NEA and he was the winner of the 2012 Reader's Digest Life Story Contest. In April 2014, Lyons Press will publish Giving the Finger, co-written with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch. He lives in San Diego with his wife, visual artist Nuvia Crisol Guerra.

Fiona Maazel is the guest. Her new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is now available from Graywolf Press. The Daily Beast says "[Maazel] has a real talent for taking these existential millstones of modern life—fear of death, failure, being alone, everything—and filtering them into morbidly funny, troublingly familiar forms. . . . Woke Up Lonely easily refutes the idea that the novel is a staid, obsolete form of writing. The stakes in Maazel's book are at least as real as any work of nonfiction, and it's a good deal more fun to read than any manifesto." And Bookforum raves "Woke Up Lonely is another wunderkammer, a deeply felt and wildly original novel that repays the attention it demands, and once read won't be soon forgotten." Monologue topics: having nothing to say, saying something anyway, to-do lists, talking about writing, my dogs, dog baths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Marcus is today's guest.  He's the author of four books of fiction, the most recent of which is the critically acclaimed novel The Flame Alphabet, now available from Knopf. "Think again," writes Fiona Maazel at Book Forum.  "[The Flame ... Continue reading → Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices