Be Brief and Tell Them Everything

by Brad Listi

Overview

A darkly funny meditation on creativity and family, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything tracks the life of a middle-aged author who is struggling to write his next novel while trying to come to grips with his son’s disabilities, set against a backdrop of ecological catastrophe and escalating human insanity in contemporary Los Angeles. A beautiful, powerful, concise work of autofiction that is reminiscent of My Struggle and Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Be Brief documents the stops and starts of adulthood and marriage, and the joys and challenges of parenting, while defining what it means to be a good man, and a good writer.   

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632461360
Publisher:	Ig Publishing
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Brad Listi was born in Milwaukee. His other books include the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder., an LA Times bestseller, and Board, a work of nonfiction collage, co-authored with Justin Benton. He is the founding editor of The Nervous Breakdown, an online literary magazine, and in 2011 he launched the Otherppl podcast, which features in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. He lives in Los Angeles. 

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Listi (Attention. Deficit. Disorder) returns with an affecting work of autofiction about a 40-something podcast host named Brad Listi who is struggling to write his next book. Brad is married to Franny, with whom he’s suffered through five miscarriages, and is the loving father of precocious elementary school–age daughter Alice, who asks, “How big is the smallest mountain?” and younger son Oscar, who’s been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. During sojourns to his garage, and while dealing with his angst over climate change, his loss of faith, and financial insecurity, he tries to get down his feelings about his family with integrity and compassion. In a meta moment, he writes how the book “started out as a novel and then it became a different novel and... then it was an essay collection and it was nothing for a while and then it was a memoir and then it became a novel again and now it’s whatever this is.” There’s no plot to speak of, but the writing is funny and honest, and includes some brilliant descriptions of Los Angeles, where everybody’s “always telling everybody else how fucking busy they are. It’s so exhausting.” Listi has found his stride and climbed his smallest mountain in this engaging and moving chronicle of melancholia and joy. This pulses with life. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A book that lives up to the challenge of its title, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything is an elegant distillation of a varied life full of early love and early death, family heartbreak, financial precarity, spiritual uncertainty, the terror of contemporary life, and the quest for meaning. In Brad Listi’s movingly rendered particulars, readers will discover points of poignant intersection, and delight as well in the wisdom, humor, warmth and intelligence of a writer who doesn’t turn away from the difficult, and who will, at least on the page, put the noodles in the blender.” —Sam Lipsyte

“In Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, Brad Listi uses sharp, crystalline prose to navigate through moments of failure, love, fatherhood, psychedelics, and the unknown. What does it mean to be an artist, a husband, a father? This novel’s reach toward meaning and understanding is truly unforgettable—I loved this book.”  —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

“I highly enjoyed Be Brief and Tell Them Everything, which I found funny and entertaining but also moving, serious, tender, and contemplative. It lives up to its title.” —Tao Lin, author of Leave Society 

“It’s a wonder the long-awaited second novel by Brad Listi didn’t kill him—or at least render him mad. Instead, he’s produced an enduring work of art and a moving guide to truth, love, and perseverance.” —Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice 

“We already knew that Brad Listi was a master of listening. His podcasts are a model for anyone: Brad asks a question and then is silent, and his silence draws us in. What we didn’t know is that Brad also listens while writing, that he can draw life in all its nakedness, in all its mystery, with all its pain and hope, into the pages of a book. That even when he speaks about himself, he holds the microphone out to the world.”—Andrea Bajani, author of If You Kept a Record of Sins

From the Publisher