Third Person Limited

Third Person Limited is a podcast about books and culture with hosts Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill, two writers living in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. Our chats include book reviews, author interviews, semi-insightful cultural analysis, snack discourse, complaining, very funny jokes, and also less funny jokes.

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The Crime Is the Least Interesting Part: An Interview with George Pelecanos

“The crime part of it is the least interesting thing for me. It’s about going into the neighborhoods and writing about people that hardly ever get written about in mainstream American fiction.”

by Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill
September 21, 2026

Nina McConigley on Partition, Immigrant Stories, and Agatha Christie

“So this story is about immigration, it’s about colonialism, but it’s also about abuse and murder. Those things are all intertwined here.”

by Mason Stockstill
May 15, 2026

John Sayles on Labor, Politics, and Money

The acclaimed Oscar-nominated independent filmmaker and novelist sits down with Third Person Limited at the Pittsburgh Review of Books.

by Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill
March 27, 2026

Is a Novel Alive?

“The ways which we would say a great novel is alive are myriad: its characters strike us not as imagined but as real, breathing humans; its settings are painted so well as to have personalities; its many meanings and interpretations change when humans and cultures change, too.”

by Mason Stockstill
February 18, 2026

Competing Natures in Jonathan Miles’s Eradication

“Is nature whatever happens to occur in the world, or is it a reality known through human perception and constructed by human intervention, and thus susceptible to the many prejudices found therein?”

by Nathan Pensky
January 30, 2026

What Tarot Cards Mean (and why are they Everywhere?)

“But if nobody uses tarot cards, can they maintain any utility as a literary symbol and metaphorical stand-in for seeking answers from unseen forces?”

by Mason Stockstill
December 19, 2025

The Beautiful Mess of Ian McEwan’s New Novel

“We’re allowed to see the present through the lens of memory, to understand the here and now both from the perspective of an inevitably diminished future and through the scholar’s nostalgia.”

by Nathan Pensky
November 20, 2025

Third Person Limited Presents: Episode 01 – Is Reading Good?

by Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill
November 18, 2025

Fluid Narratives and the Culture Wars

“A slippery narrative POV reminds us that storytelling — and hence life, the world, and everything in it — is a muddle of competing and conflicting interpretations.”

by Mason Stockstill
October 28, 2025

The Limits of Likeability

Third Person Limited reads Ivy Pochoda

by Nathan Pensky
September 3, 2025

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