Publishers Weekly
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)
From the Publisher
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
