Booksmith is thrilled to present a virtual event with Brad Listi for Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. He'll be in conversation with the author of Doubting Thomas, Matthew Clark Davison.

• This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
• You can order Be Brief and Tell Them Everything here and we'll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).
• We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact [email protected].

About the book

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.  

About the authors

Brad Listi was born in Milwaukee. He is the author of the novel Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing / May 2022). 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.

Matthew Clark Davison's debut novel, Doubting Thomas, was published in Summer 2021 by Amble Press. He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend's living room on Douglass Street. The textbook version of The Lab, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, will be published by Norton in 2022. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews (Epiphany Publishing) and 580-Split; and published in or on The Advocate, Exquisite Pandemic, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, Cultural Equities Grant, Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award. 

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.