All right, welcome to The Other People Show. My name is Brad Listy, and I'm in Los Angeles.

The Other People podcast is a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading authors.

I'm happy to have you here.

Thank you for listening. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. You can also subscribe on YouTube and you can follow me on Blue Sky and Instagram. So I'll be talking with Andrew Lipstein today.

He is making his triumphant return, celebrating the publication of a new novel called Something

Rotten.

It was published earlier this year by Farrar Strauss and Giroux.

And it's another novel from Andrew Lipstein that does what I love for works of

literary fiction to do in that it is smart, it is propulsive, it is gripping, it is funny,

it's dark, it's doing all of these things. And he is a very gifted writer who has been on a run.

This is his third novel published in three years. And, you know, I've seen it said that these

three books are a kind of trilogy. You'll hear Andrew and I talk about this. It's not entirely

what he intended, but these books do have some shared thematic concerns,

and something rotten is a, I guess thrillerish might be a little bit much,

but it's got a mystery at the heart of it.

And it's a book that calls into question the meaning of truth in the modern world.

It's a relationship book.

It's a book about a guy named Rubin who is dislocated, both geographically because he's in Denmark with his Danish wife

and their young baby. And then he's also dislocated from, I think, his sense of self. Professionally,

he has been canceled due to an unfortunate error.

And so he's lost his work identity.

And then he's in Denmark for a while and he's kind of remaking himself.

...