Third Person Limited: A Books Podcast

The first in an occasional series focusing on short stories we found in various journals, and interviews with those authors. Short stories don't get much love outside of The New Yorker or MFA workshops, but they should! Many of them are incredible. Our guests include writers Billy Irving, Kelly Magee, and Kit McGuire. 
Works cited this episode:
Alyoshenka legendNine Stories, J.D. Salinger“The Sound of Thunder,” Ray Bradbury“The Lady or the Tiger,” Frank R. StocktonThere is no Antimemetics Division, qntm“The Neighborhood,” Kelly Magee
Don't forget to visit our site at thirdpersonlimited.com, find us on Bluesky, and leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. 

We knew Zuck was a fan of the podcast. We didn’t know he would go so far as to dig up our old articles and use them, along with a million other books, to train Meta’s AI. Oh, you say he didn’t do it himself, and maybe it’s not stealing (legal opinions pending)? This may be true, or it may just be a topic we debate on this episode. Plus: We review the novel Luminous, by Silvia Park, a touching story of humans seeking connection in a world where robots walk among us.

Writer Erin Lyndal Martin joins the show to inform us that Saddam Hussein wrote a romance novel, but only after we wondered if Joe Rogan could do it. Other topics include whether men should read more literature, which we think Yes! They should; and whether men doing so would make the world a better place, which we think is debatable. Also, what to do about books that are capital-I Important but maybe not so great?

Bestselling author of The Confessions and bookstore owner Paul Bradley Carr returns for Part 2 of our conversation about artificial intelligence, the power of narratives, drinking blood, and whether vaping is cool (spoiler: it’s not). The AI chatbots kept trying to disrupt our Zoom session with Paul, but for now, humans remain dominant. We also discuss Tom Comitta’s Patchwork, a novella constructed entirely from snippets of text taken from other, previously published works. One of our hosts was turned off by this experimental approach. Try to guess which one! We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Author Kyle Winkler joins this episode to talk about horror fiction and his novel Tone Bone. What's scarier: There's a Wocket in my Pocket or Goodnight Moon? Plus, we review BLOB by Maggie Su, and in the process, we enjoy saying "blob" over and over again. Try it!

We invited former tech journalist and bestselling author Paul Bradley Carr for a rollicking discussion about his new novel, The Confessions. It features an all-knowing Artificial Intelligence that doesn’t want to destroy the world—because it was trained by reading fiction. He also shared his polite and not-at-all derogatory thoughts about several leading tech industry personalities. Plus, our discussion of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s latest novel, Ballerina, inspired Nathan to invent the cool new subgenre Proustian Noir. 

We were joined by author and poet Dan Eastman for a discussion about confessional poetry, second-person POV, and the best memes. I ask you: should poems mention Facebook? Still waiting on our podcast name during this episode. Nice of Dan to not make fun of us for this.

Nate and Mason both have MFAs, but do they go around telling everyone and demanding book deals because of it? Well, yes, if you’re offering. But anyway, a social media firestorm about a take about Sally Rooney not having an MFA got us thinking: Are They Good and Should Anyone Care?

Our first episode, before we even had a name for this podcast. So, it's a big question, whether reading is good. Specifically, is reading fiction inherently good, as well as instrumentally good (meaning, it’s good for some other reason, like making you smarter)? We grapple with this, mostly by talking. Also: Why do so many YA novels use orphans as protagonists?