Wednesday, February 3 Fund Drive

No show today. Instead, it's the KPFK Winter Fund Drive 2010. Lots of special programming in the next couple of weeks, including great music and lectures. To support the station call (818) 985-5735 or go online at http://www.kpfk.org/ and give big.

Thank you for supporting Bibliocracy. Thank you for supporting your alternative, reality-based, noncommercial, anti-corporate people's radio station. With a great books show, too.

Wednesday, January 27 - A Heartbeat and a Guitar

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK is a filmmaker and a cultural historian who’s written before about another favorite subject, Joe Strummer of The Clash. Now Antonino D’Ambrosio has authored A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears, a delightful revisionist take-apart of popular music, the America Civil Rights Movement, Native American sovereignty, all considered through Johnny Cash’s brave and deeply political 1964 album, “Bitter Tears,” which features so many amazing songs by songwriter Peter La Farge, most famous being perhaps “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” In A Heartbeat and a Guitar, we get art, politics, and a thoughtful, provocative, polemical guide to the limits of American engagement with the struggles of Native Americans --- and the fight by Johnny Cash to push back. For more on this excellent book: http://www.aheartbeatandaguitar.com/.

Wednesday, January 20 - Tod Goldberg

Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK my guest is the novelist and mystery writer Tod Goldberg, whose Living Dead Girl was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He also writes the popular Burn Notice series and short stories, in addition to reviewing for the LA Times. His previous short story collection was Simplify, and he is my guest today on the occasion of his second collection, with the perfect and enviable title Other Resort Cities, featuring places you’ll recognize in our Southern California desert, and characters who live there, however darkly: a retired Salton Sea sheriff, a mobster posing as a rabbi in Vegas, a father who kidnaps his children and hides in Inland Empire model homes. These are literary short stories with the appeal of noir, and set in moments of decline and loss that define our boom and bust economy and culture. Funny, smart and dangerous, Goldberg’s short stories are also very fun to read. Thanks for listening. Fund drive starts next week. Please support Bibliocracy Radio and KPFK.

Wednesday, January 13 - Riverbig

Aris J. in Studio C, at Bibliocracy Headquarters.

Wednesday, 2:30 pm on KPFK. Barbara Kingsolver, John Steinbeck, and of course William Saroyan. All writers who’ve written a kind of social realism, with the concerns of the land itself as a character, along with its human exploiters and caretakers. Mix in some Carey McWilliams and a level of hard-earned detail and careful description of what it means to grow tomatoes or corn, to tend orchards and to struggle with the elements. Finally, add the political and cultural legacy as lived by the Armenian diaspora in America and you begin to get a preview of the completely realized world of Fresno, California, 1964 as offered by my guest today, Aris Janigian in his new novel, Riverbig. Published by Heyday Books, Riverbig continues the modest saga of the life of Andy Demerjian, a farmer who drinks too much, tries to respect his elders, struggles with his own mistakes and those of others, to redeem himself. About Riverbig, Carolyn See writes that “it combines all the pent-up rages of the old world with the rare and fragile hopes of the new.” Thanks for listening. Programs are archived on the station's website for 90 days, free.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - Poet Charles Harper Webb

Wednesday at 2:30 my guest is poet Charles Harper Webb, whose humor and humanity arrives in powerful short poems about, among other topics, the death of Santa, overlooked Old Testament heroes, his hair, a vindictive prayer for the man who mugged his elderly father and the extinction of myriad animal species: “One by one, like actors after a play that ran for years and wowed the world, they link their hands and bow before the curtain falls.” Charles Harper Webb is the award-winning author of numerous books, now organized in a new collection with additional newer poems, Shadow Ball. He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he directs the MFA in creative writing program when he is not being one of the most reliably funny, smart, idiomatic and sly writers of contemporary American poetry. Cheer yourself up. Listen to this poet, live or archived for 90 days on the KPFK website. Happy New Year, okay?

Wednesday, December 30

Wednesday at 2:30 pm. Today our subject is one literary hero, as remembered and celebrated by another literary hero. Kurt Vonnegut likely needs little introduction to the KPFK community, to politicos, to readers generally, as anybody who’s read anything has read Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, and of essays and speeches and short stories and more. Lucky for us, my guest is someone who’s known and befriended and boostered everybody who’s written, and is himself a novelist and memoirist and children’s book writer who was a friend to many, including the late Kurt Vonnegut. He is the writer Sidney Offit, author of the literary memoir, Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen, about which Michael Corda writes “It is possible that Sidney Offit knows more famous and interesting people than anyone else on earth, and what is more, has a funny and shrewdly observed story about each of them.... He is truly 20th Century New York City’s answer to Samuel Pepys.” On today's show I'm lucky to remember and celebrate the work of Kurt Vonnegut with his good friend, on the occasion of publication of previously unpublished short stories by Vonnegut in Look at the Birdie, with its introduction by Sidney Offit. This is one fun show. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, December 23 - Best American

Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. The Best American Short Stories series, published by Houghton Mifflin, has established itself as a must-own collection over nearly 100 years of publishing and thirty of presenting what an impressive list of guest writers choose as his or her favorites. Representative, sometimes idiocyncratic, the results are debated, celebrated, questioned, studied, in every way making the Best American Short Stories necessary year-end reading. My guest today is the novelist Heidi Pitlor, who holds the difficult if enviable job of working with that rotating lineup of authors - this year, Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones) whose final selections make up the annual issue’s table of contents. Heidi Pitlor is herself author of a novel, The Birthdays, which Margot Livesy calls “An exhilarating debut." Since 2007 Pitlor has served as the series editor of the Best American Short Stories, and I thought that today I might start what will I hope be a tradition and check in with its editor, remind listeners of this terrific institution, and review the contents of the current volume. Thanks for listening. Happy Holidays.