Wednesday night at 8 o’clock (PST) on KPFK FM in Southern California. Alan Cheuse. Tonight I share a show taped on the campus of the University of Southern California, site of this year’s recent LA Times Festival of Books. It’s the best way I could arrange to interview in person one of my favorite books people in the whole world, Alan Cheuse, novelist and short story writer, teacher, editor and critic and, of course mentor to anybody who aims for making careful, generous, smart radio about books. You’ll recognize Alan’s voice from his long, impressive tenure at NPR where for twenty years he has offered short, thoughtful, necessary book reviews. He is himself a celebrated author and his own writing is the subject of our meeting at the Festival, on the occasion of a new novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert: A Novel of Slavery and the Southern Wild, a completely satisfying story with something for everyone: an examination of freedom and love, of responsibility and tradition, all with a completely thrilling plot and characters with whom one identifies immediately upon meeting them. Thanks for listening. Available on the radio or online live, and downloadable free for 90 days at the station’s website archives. Find me on Facebook.
3 comments:
He bears that stereotypical old time artist look. I dig it. If he wasn't writing, no doubt his calling wouldmhave taken him straight to another art.
Great show; thanks for allowing us to see that side of Alan Cheuse and the American novel more generally over public airwaves: The "complicated, massive" question at the heart of both. Reminds me, too, that the novelist's historical question now, not only in the past, puts our ethos between owner and owned, albeit through an ownership that has since shifted, since the second middle passage, from private property of individuals to the private properties public community.
(I meant to type "the private properties OF public community.)
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