Wednesday, November 4 - Dylan Landis

Today at 2:30 my guest is Dylan Landis. In her new novel- in-stories, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, Landis develops in one character after another a kind of interdependent consciousness --- whether the characters know it or not --- between mothers and daughters, bad-girl girlfriends and grown-up boyfriends and adult women in a book which Susan Salter Reynolds calls in a glowing Los Angeles Times review “photosynthesis,” comparing the main character to Holden Caufield. In this, her debut novel, Landis, who has worked as a journalist and nonfiction writer, arranges perspective with language and place across adolescence, creating in the story of young Leah Levinson in 1970's Manhattan a multi-dimensional portrait. Landis has published fiction in Bomb, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and won the Poets & Writers California Voices Award. About the novel, Janet Fitch writes: "In this bracing debut, Dylan Landis guides us into the harsh, secretive world of girls, where the mysteries of power and sexuality baldly govern, and adults and teenagers occasionally intersect across the barbed wire of a mutually earned mistrust." Listen on Wednesday at 2:30 on the radio or online, and download free from the KPFK audio archives for ninety days. http://www.kpfk.org. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, October 28 - Greil Marcus

It's a new day and new time for Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK: Wednesdays, at 2;30. On today's show, Greil Marcus and A New Literary History of America! The arrival of any book written or edited by Marcus marks a happy day indeed, and the publication of this big one on a big theme means a happy couple of weeks or months of reading and thinking and rereading. Fans of his previous landmark critical and creative work --- take-aparts of rock’n’roll, politics and American culture in Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train, The Rose and the Briar --- will recognize his singular imagination and ambition, and welcome a project perhaps only Greil Marcus could take on. With co-editor Werner Sollors, he has organized a literary compendium, an encyclopedia, an anthology of essays about all things American, from 1507 to 2009, Amerigo Vespuci to Barack Obama. The collection, remarkable for its vision and energy, is A New Literary History of America, and it delivers big-time, with the same welcome idiosyncracy, creativity and enthusiasm, offering secret and not-so-secret histories of our weird, wonderful land in 200 original literary essays commissioned just for this project, written by Walter Mosley, Bharati Mukherjee, Andrei Codrescu, to name, as they say, only a few. Read about it on the nifty Harvard University Press website (http://newliteraryhistory.com/) and join me at the show's new time, 2:30 on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.

Monday October 19, 2009 - Luis Urrea

Following the fund drive, Bibliocracy returns to the air with a re-broadcast of a recent interview with Luis Urrea.



Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother. He is an award-winning poet and essayist, author of 11 books. The Devil's Highway, his non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. A national best-seller, The Devil's Highway was also named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and many other publications. He’s also author of Across the Wire, a memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, and a book of shot stories, Six Kinds of Sky. His most recent novel was The Hummingbird's Daughter and now he’s out with a new book, Into the Beautiful North, a story that is part social satire and part genuine, if cheerfully irreverent historical revisionism. Inspired by the film “The Magnificent Seven,” an unlikely group from the small Mexican village of Tres Camarones embarks on a journey to find their own seven protectors, to save the town from drug dealers who have moved in after all the men in town have gone to the beautiful north for work. Urrea’s writing always challenges the hegemony of perspective and point of view, and this laugh of out loud funny, political adventure story about three attractive teenage girls and a gay man takes on stereotypes and embraces pop culture in a story that will charm readers with its ensemble characters and its reconsideration of place and borders and its ironic take on idiom.

Luis Alberto Urrea is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

***

In the encore half-hour of Bibliocracy, KPFK will rebroadcast an interview with Victoria Patterson about her debut collection, Drift.



Thanks for listening, either live on the radio or online, or to archived shows.

Monday, September 15 - poet Marilyn Nelson

Today at noon on KPFK I’ll play a reading recorded at the Casa Romantica Reading Series in San Clemente. For more on this excellent free public reading series offered monthly, visit the Casa website. On a recent evening there, next to the pier and the seashore in South Orange County, a roomful of poetry fans heard poet Marilyn Nelson. Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her book The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. Other books, all award-winners, include The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, Carver: A Life In Poems, A Wreath For Emmett Till and Fortune’s Bones. Most recently, The Cachoiera Tales And Other Poems won the L.E. Phillabaum Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her newest, from which she also reads now, is Freedom Business: Including a Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, with Deborah Muirhead. “The reward for freeing people,” she writes, in the voice of an ex-slave who bought his own family, “is a broken heart.” Marilyn Nelson’s honors include NEA creative writing fellowships, a Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. Marilyn Nelson is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut; founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony; and was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut.

Stay tuned in the Bibliocracy Radio encore half-hour for a rebroadcast of my show with novelist Larry Beinhart, author of Salvation Boulevard, the perfect summer political conflict novel, whether you are reading at the beach or at a town hall meeting or shouting down the president of the United States on behalf of your faith-based, anti-woman, pro-militia, gun-nutty, Sarah Palin-lovin' "pals." Stay cool.

Monday, August 31 - Mary Gaitskill

Monday at noon my guest on Bibliocracy is Mary Gaitskill. She is author of three collections of stories and two novels including her breakthrough first book, Bad Behavior. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories and The O.Henry Prize Stories and a recent issue of The Threepenny Review. Among literary artists, Mary Gaitskill makes plausible and real, even required of her characters a seriousness and urgency about the ideas that inform their sorrow, self-destruction, recklessness, curiosity, confusion and, above all, pain. "Sometimes, things that look really ugly on the outside look different when you get up close," the protagonist of a new story tells herself. Another searches for what she calls “the agonized face,” an honest representation of sex and women’s pain. Gaitskill’s characters struggle with “wordless knowledge” and, in one, a man steals a woman’s soul, which talks to him. Always, in the language and dialog, in the characterization of troubled people, there is more than we and they can bear, and more than many writers are able to tell. Ten stories by Mary Gaitskill, collected here in Don’t Cry, make for a real occasion for short story readers, and it’s my pleasure to welcome her to Bibliocracy.

Stay tuned in the encore half-hour for a rebroadcast of my interview with Blake Baily, John Cheever biographer. Thanks for listening, and for supporting the work of the only independent community radio station in Southern California. 90.7 FM/98.7 FM in Santa Barbara. Online and archived at http://www.kpfk.org.

Monday, August 24, 2009 - Luis Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother. He is an award-winning poet and essayist, author of 11 books. The Devil's Highway, his non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. A national best-seller, The Devil's Highway was also named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and many other publications. He’s also author of Across the Wire, a memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, and a book of shot stories, Six Kinds of Sky. His most recent novel was The Hummingbird's Daughter and now he’s out with a new book, Into the Beautiful North, a story that is part social satire and part genuine, if cheerfully irreverent historical revisionism. Inspired by the film “The Magnificent Seven,” an unlikely group from the small Mexican village of Tres Camarones embarks on a journey to find their own seven protectors, to save the town from drug dealers who have moved in after all the men in town have gone to the beautiful north for work. Urrea’s writing always challenges the hegemony of perspective and point of view, and this laugh of out loud funny, political adventure story about three attractive teenage girls and a gay man takes on stereotypes and embraces pop culture in a story that will charm readers with its ensemble characters and its reconsideration of place and borders and its ironic take on idiom. Luis Alberto Urrea is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Thanks for listening, either live on the radio or online, or to archived shows.

Monday, August 17 - poet Bob Cowser, Jr.

Monday at noon I’ll play another reading recorded at the Casa Romantica Reading Series in San Clemente. For more on this excellent free public reading series offered monthly, go to the Casa website. Bob Cowser, Jr. read at a recent Casa event. His first book, Dream Season was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books. It garnered further praise in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and on NPR's "Only a Game." His second book, Scorekeeping, a collection of coming-of-age essays, was published in October 2006. Cowser is at work on a third book about the murder of one of his grade school classmates and the execution of her killer, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola-New Orleans, then earned a Master's in English at Marquette University and PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. An Academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He is Associate Professor of English at St. Lawrence University. He also serves as associate editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Cowser lives on the Grasse River in Canton, New York. He reads today, on Bibliocracy, his startlingly moving personal essay, “Scorekeeping,” on baseball, suicide, beautiful young men and poetry.

In our encore half hour, I'll play my March 2009 show featuring historian Jon Bekken on Louis Adamic's Dynamite.