Wednesday, July 4 - Paula Priamos

TONIGHT at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM:  PAULA PRIAMOS.  My guest tonight has a written a self-described noir detective memoir, an old and stylized form unlikely perhaps for a young woman writer of today.  But, given the family she is raised in, with a compulsive and crooked con artist father and a mother in some kind of collaborationist denial with her criminal defense attorney husband, Paula Priamos’s dark and suspicious worldview seems just right.  In The Shyster’s Daughter: A Memoir, we meet a cast of characters and situations out of Nathaneal West or Joan Didion, writ smaller but no less ominously, especially to an ostensibly upper middle class young Greek-American horseback riding girl from Chino, California.  There is a killer on the loose, a jaundiced baby, a suicidal teenaged sister, an eccentric pervert uncle, a best girlfriend’s secret abortion, not to mention the predictably dreadful line-up of obviously, gruesomely transgressive clients defended by the author’s “shyster” lawyer father, who is not at all motivated by a commitment to justice but instead puts the family’s security, even lives, at risk. Paula Priamos teaches at Cal State University San Bernardino and lives with her husband, the writer Jim Brown.  The Shyster’s Daughter is published by Etruscan Press.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online or as a download from the station’s archives.  Support independent bookstores.  Support community radio.