Episode 87 — Scott McClanahan

Summary: Scott McClanahan is the guest. He is the author of several books, the latest of which is called THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, VOL. 1, now available from Lazy Fascist Press. Volume I Brooklyn raves: "He might be one of the great southern storytellers of our time." And Donald Ray Pollock says "Scott McClanahan is a powerful, exceptional writer, and the overall effect of reading his deceptively simple stories is like getting hit in the head by a champion cage fighter cranked up on meth that was cooked in a trailer without running water in some Kentucky backwoods where people sing murder ballads to their children to put them to sleep." Topics of conversation include: West Virginia, Beckley, Rainelle, continental, double-wide, coal mining, New River, regional values, teaching, nursing, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, drugs, pharmaceutical, Mad Dog 40/40, accent, geography, Columbus Indiana, Fayette County, Scotch-Irish, moonshiners, Flynt Michigan, Kroger's, produce managers, Occupy Wall Street, unions, benefits, ex-convicts, Mother Jones, mortality, stupidity, apprentice years, compulsive writing, Finnegan's Wake, Merle Haggard, James Joyce, No One Here Gets Out Alive, The Doors, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, word games, James Ellroy, Nick Tosches, obscurity, unawareness, The Autobiography of Chuck Berry, Greil Marcus, low comedy, Setonius, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, only children, Mountain Dew, choking, family, John Waters, literary journals, the Internet, Civil War memoirs, Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen, bourgeois art, radical life, Oscar Wilde, finding out about stuff, and publication schedules. Monologue topics: hangovers, fatigue, professional athletes and entertainers, ESPYs, comparing, despairing, and 2 percent body fat. This episode of Other People is brought to you by THE BEAUTIFUL ANTHOLOGY, edited by Elizabeth Collins, now available from TNB Books, the official independent press of The Nervous Breakdown. Get it wherever books are sold online.