Wednesday, December 2 - Stanley Crawford

My guest at 2:30 --- on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles --- is Stanley Crawford. His brilliant 1972 satirical novel Log of the SS The Mrs. Unguentine has been reissued by the good people at Dalkey Archive Press, and his other novels are mostly available now, including Gascoyne, Some Instructions to My Wife and Petroleum Man, his most recent. In Log of the SS The Mrs. Unguentine we are provided the record of a marriage, charmed if doomed, written in log form by a woman we understand is the bride of one Mr. Unguentine, for forty years living, perhaps kidnapped, by her overbearing, devoted, eccentric inventor husband, sailing and drifting across the seas alone together on a giant barge with gardens and an artificial forest, bearing him a child and being abandoned by him, mysteriously. Voice and style define this imaginative, funny, visionary writing, which has been compared to Barthelme, Vonnegut and Jules Verne. Stanley Crawford is also the author of nonfiction books, about his life as a garlic farmer in New Mexico, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Mexico Farm and also Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico and A River in Winter. Discovering Crawford's fiction has meant nothing but delight and wonder for this reader. Hear Stanley Crawford read from his work and talk to me at 2:30 on the radio or online, or downloadable free for 90 days at the station archives. Thanks for listening! Support KPFK. Support your community radio station.