Bibliocracy Radio

January 25 - Paul Buhle on Robin Hood

2012-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM: PAUL BUHLE. The Bibliofella welcomes back to the air one of the leading editors, social historians, archivists, anthologists of Left culture, but also just a really fun guy who likes comics a whole lot, and has done so much to make them a people’s medium in the political sense. He is author or editor of, to name only a few,

a comic book version of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire and of Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History. With his friend and collaborator Harvey Pekar, he organized Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form. One of my favorites is Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, featuring art by Pekar, Seth Tobocman, Sue Coe and Spain Rodriguez. Tonight, just in time for the Arab Spring, Occupy USA, Wisconsin labor protests, heroic Dream Activists and all the rest of the necessary, vital and beautiful resistance to power, coercion and violence: Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest! Yes, clad in green, and alive in imagination, Hood appears and reappears just when we need him: in poetry, books, television and film, as a powerful and empowering trope. My guest Paul Buhle has just edited a collection of critical essays on the Hoodster, with illustrations by some terrific artists: Chris Hutchinson, Gary Dumm and Sharon Rudahl. New from the great PM Press, Buhle will talk with me about the Man in Green and about his newest collection, Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero. Thanks for listening, live on the radio or online, and downloadable for free at the KPFK station archives.

Wednesday, January 18 - Gary Younge Encore!

2012-01-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California: Gary Younge. They call this an “evergreen,” a show good enough to run a second time. It’s one of my favorites, featuring a favorite writer-activist. For this reader, already steeped, proudly, happily, in plenty of progressive, Left, alternative media analysis, lots of discussion about diversity and representation, the arrival of a book which builds on an honest and rich personal memoir to consider the role of identity has been a happy occasion. Written by one of my favorite political and cultural analysts, the book has pleased in at least two ways: as a practical guide to that discussion and as an affirmation of the role of memoir, of perspective, of the relationship of the personal to the work of the political journalist. Gary Younge is a political journalist. He is a careful and sincere writer also armed with wit and humor, and not afraid to tell the truth. Which you know if you are, like me, a fan of his work for The Nationand the Guardian, of his “Younge America”Guardian video dispatches. In this new book, he reintroduces himself and then offers a primer, a history, a critique, and, helpfully, answers the big questions in the book’s title:Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? And if you’ve somehow missed Younge’s previous work, consider this enthusiastic blurb from Margaret Atwood: “An indispensable guide to ‘identity’ in politics, and a terrific read!” Gary Younge is also author ofStranger in a Strange Land and No Place Like Home, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. He received the James Cameron Prize for his reporting and is a fellow at The Nation Institute. Thanks for listening, live on the radio or online, and downloadable free for 90 days from the station’s archives.

Wednesday, January 11 - A Safeway in Arizona

2012-01-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK in Southern California: TOM ZOELLNER. Reporter and nonfiction writer Zoellner, a native Arizonan, has written a sincere, honest, provocative, book bound to be a major contribution to popular literature about ourselves, our nation, our responsibility to understand each other. A Safeway in Arizona tells the story of the shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords by a mentally ill gun owner, of life in Arizona --- with its flimsy economic model built on get rich quick real estate schemes, anti-immigrant politics, weird elected officials --- and also of some brave and beautiful people, including Giffords and Zoellner himself, struggling to make something like democracy out of the state’s singularly difficult history. A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tell us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America is a startling and moving book about the people who make our politics, about loss and violence but also about struggle and commitment. It reminded this reader of DJ Waldie’s Holy Land, about Lakewood, California, for its ambitious and heartfelt personal meditation meets socio-political study. Zoellner is author of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, winner of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award; The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire; co-author of An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle and is Associate Professor of English at Chapman University. Read his commentary in today’s Los Angeles Times at: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0111-zoellner-arizona-20120111,0,3544601.story. Thanks for listening, live on the radio, online or downloadable, free, for 90 days from the KPFK audio archives.

Wednesday, January 4 novelist Chris Bachelder

2012-01-02T13:11:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night at 8 on KPFK: Novelist CHRIS BACHELDER. Self-doubt meets ambitious expectation in a small, wonderful, funny, perfect little novel by one of my favorite young writers, Chris Bachelder. His new book, Abbot Awaits, considers the existential meaning of parenthood, its anxiety and ecstasy, and the problem of trying to buy a couch and care for your toddler and love your wife who is expecting your second child, all while the world makes even the idea of purpose, much less procreation, so complicated, wonderful and terrifying. In Abbot --- Bachelder’s hero, a university instructor on summer break --- we find honest and wildly, darkly humorous self-doubt in the everyday, in the absurd and in the quotidian moments of being a husband and dad and human being who imagines both so much more and so much less. He is constantly anxious, fatigued, and ambivalent and of course somehow also committed to his family even as all the familiars of his previous life seem to be rearranged or disappear. Chris Bachelder is the author of one of my favorite-ever novels, US, about tenacious muckraking Left activist Upton Sinclair come back from the dead --- only to be assassinated in each chapter! --- and also the hilarious Bear v. Shark, built on the premise of the ultimate parlor game. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Thanks for listening, live on the radio, or online. And downloadable, free for 90 days, from the KPFK audio archives. Buy books. Support community radio. Follow KPFK and Bibliocracy on Facebook.

Wednesday, December 28 - Diane Lefer Reads

2011-12-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on Bibliocracy: DIANE LEFER. Tonight is a special performance edition of the program, a complete reading of a full-length short story by a local favorite writer with a national reputation. Diane Lefer is an author, playwright, and activist whose most recent short-story collection, California Transit, was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and published by Sarabande Books. With Colombian exile Hector Aristizábal she is co-author of the nonfiction book, The Blessing Next to the Wound (Lantern Books, 2010) named by Amnesty International as a book to read during Banned Books Week. Their theatrical collaboration, Nightwind, has toured the U.S., Canada, and the world, including performances for human rights organizations in Colombia and Afghanistan. Her short crime novel, Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, is forthcoming from Rainstorm Press. Diane lives in Los Angeles and leads arts and social justice workshops in the US and Latin America. Tonight she reads, "Eydie Gorme Was a Little Spanish Girl," published recently in the Platte Valley Review. For more on Diane: http://dianelefer.weebly.com/. Thanks for listening live on the radio, online or as a free download from the station’s archives. Feel free to leave comments or suggestions on the Bib blog site.

Wednesday, December 21 - Ben Ehrenreich

2011-12-19T19:26:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM: BEN EHRENREICH. A collection of characters assembled in a dreamy parable, narrated by an alternately judicious, troubled, stubborn, mean yet authoritative narrator. A talking cockatiel asking its existential questions. “Think you’re much? Know you’re living?” A post-apocalypse urban nightmare where cameras watch what seems a world of both homeless survivors and you and me, in our all-too-familiar postmodern absurdist reality. This is the putative setting of Ben Ehrenreich’s new novel, Ether, which seems to explore the place of a shamed god figure, in the spirit of wordplay and drama of “Waiting for Godot,” but with contemporary poetic realism and smart humor: Beckett meets Nathaniel West. The novel constructs place and image out of archetype, but with precise and elegant prose describing in harsh and beautiful detail that place where dream and reality coexist. Characters include the narrator, who doles out fate and faith, the Bagman, the Stranger, Angel Gabriel, Michael a lawyer and perhaps former angel also, Pigeon a little boy who finds a magic portal, the Preacher, teenage girls, Lillith the ur-woman who is a deaf mute, violent skinhead boys who cannot, or will not hear what is spoken, and a stray dog. All to say that this is a normal city totally realized in a worldview of complication and emotion and big ideas, about belief and existence. My guest this week is the author of Ether, Ben Ehrenreich, an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. He wrote a previous novel, The Suitors, a retelling of Penelope’s story from the Odyssey, and his short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Bomb and Black Clock. Is this show great, or what? Thanks for listening, live on the radio, online anytime and downloadable free from the KPFK radio archives. www.kpfk.org. And thanks for supporting the station during our recent winter fund drive.

Wednesday, December 7 - Elissa Schappell

2011-12-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK: Elissa Schappell. Reading Elissa Shappel’s new collection of inter-connected short stories is an exercise in empathy, in sharing the intimacy of her characters’ lives through voice, emotional closeness, wit and dark humor. The stories of Blueprints for Building Better Girls are a challenge as these young women and girls seem alternately victims, enablers, sometimes fighters, but deeply hurt young women who struggle nonetheless, and whose creator, Schappell, forces a kind of unflinching honesty upon them. And us. Schappell is the author of a breakthrough novel, Use Me, and co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House, and its Editor-at-Large. Before that, she was at The Paris Review. She has co-edited two anthologies of essays, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Elissa Schappell is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of the "Hot Type" books column. Join me for conversation with and readings by Elissa Schappell. Thanks for listening live on the old-fashioned FM radio, online or as a free download from the KPFP archives. www.kpfk.org

Wednesday, November 30 - Frank Schaeffer

2011-11-28T10:50:00.000-08:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK Radio 90.7 FM: FRANK SCHAEFFER. Author and activist Frank Schaeffer’s life journey was unlikely even before he challenged the values and politics of his evangelical superstar parents, royalty of the religious right. His bestselling memoir, Crazy for God told the story of his transformation from heir apparent to dissident, from political activist for the anti-choice, anti-women’s rights missionary empire to civil liberties advocate. Now, in the latest installment of his life story, called Sex, Mom and God, Schaeffer explores his unlikely relationship with his mother, arguing by way of her fascinating example that it is fundamentalism’s fear of women’s sexuality which accounts for its misogyny and sadism. Funny, honest, open-hearted, this is a thinking, and feeling person’s tell-all, a triumph of humanity and intellect over destiny and self-hatred, and one of the most fun and lively books I’ve read about being somebody’s child, and being an adult and trying to reconcile with their legacy. Frank Schaeffer is also the author of Keeping Faith, Patience With God and Portofino, and has appeared widely speaking on the subject of religion and public policy. Thanks for listening, on the radio live or online, or downloadable, free, from the KPFK archives. God bless you!

Wednesday, November 23 - Anne Enright

2011-11-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night at 8 PM on KPFK: Novelist Anne Enright. Set not just in, but also against the so-called Irish economic miracle and its subsequent bust, Enright’s new novel, The Forgotten Waltz explores a kind of emotional historical revisionism of a love affair. “Who would have thought love could be so expensive?” asks our sad heroine, the bright if perhaps self-deluding Gina Moynihan, who breaks up her own marriage and that of her married lover, in romantic scheming which might parallel the economic scheme we know will soon collapse. But what, finally, does it all mean to Gina? The book’s totally engaging and --- in her way --- sympathetic, attractive if flawed heroine presents a behavior of cultivated disengagement even in the passion of illicit love. Gina is a character whose self-awareness comes and goes with love and sexual passion, and then regret and sad resignation, always skirting responsbility. Yet she is presented so honestly, so fairly by Enright, as to be one the most self-consciously unreliable narrators you’ll meet. Anne Enright’s stylish prose and winning humor, her powers of description make the minute large in its emotional consequence. Enright is author of The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize, as well as short stories and nonfiction. Thanks for listening on the radio, online or, on a free download from the station’s archives.

Wednesday, Nov 9 - War Resisters League

2011-11-06T20:24:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night at 8 PM. War Resisters League 2012 calendar editor Liz Roberts. Yes, a departure this week from books, to pay homage to a tradition, sadly about to be over. After a 57-year publication streak, the War Resister's League, our nation’s enduring nonviolent direct action community, presents its final personal appointment calendar. This final edition features dazzling full-color reproductions of all 57 previous covers, a living record of images and words collected to celebrate anti-war, peace and social justice organizing. I’ll speak with Liz Roberts, editor of this final issue, about the artists, screenwriters, activists, poets and historians who contributed over the years, from Einstein to Grace Paley to John Sayles, and share some of the best of the calendar. This show arrives just in time for your holiday gift giving, and the calendar was a recent pledge drive premium. Join me to celebrate the 2012 War Resisters League calendar --- art and history in your hands every day of the year, and a document memorializing decades of voices and lives making art for peace. Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or anytime via station archives download, free for 90 days from broadcast. Thanks for your support of our recent fund drive.

Wednesday, October 12 - Gary Younge

2011-10-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California: Gary Younge. For this reader, already steeped, proudly, happily, in plenty of progressive, Left, alternative media analysis, lots of discussion about diversity and representation, the arrival of a book which builds on an honest and rich personal memoir to consider the role of identity has been a happy occasion. Written by one of my favorite political and cultural analysts, the book has pleased in at least two ways: as a practical guide to that discussion and as an affirmation of the role of memoir, of perspective, of the relationship of the personal to the work of the political journalist. Gary Younge is a political journalist. He is a careful and sincere writer also armed with wit and humor, and not afraid to tell the truth. Which you know if you are, like me, a fan of his work for The Nation and the Guardian, of his “Younge America” Guardian video dispatches. In this new book, he reintroduces himself and then offers a primer, a history, a critique, and, helpfully, answers the big questions in the book’s title: Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? And if you’ve somehow missed Younge’s previous work, consider this enthusiastic blurb from Margaret Atwood: “An indispensable guide to ‘identity’ in politics, and a terrific read!” Gary Younge is also author of Stranger in a Strange Land and No Place Like Home, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. He received the James Cameron Prize for his reporting and is a fellow at The Nation Institute. Thanks for listening, live on the radio or online, and downloadable free for 90 days from the station’s archives. Please support KPFK beginning next week, during our fall 2011 fund drive. I will offer special thank-you premiums, of course, but mostly am counting on listeners, guests of Bibliocracy, editors, agents and writers to come through for one of the few shows and stations devoted to literacy, books, civic engagement and celebrating the reading and writing life.

Wednesday, October 5 - Luminarium by Alex Shakar

2011-10-04T18:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night at 8 PM on KPFK: Alex Shakar. In Alex Shakar’s new novel, Luminarium, the funhouse of the virtual life is often funny, certainly ironic, but not so fun…not if you are disenfranchised, unable to exercise real-life power and trust your own judgment, or have fallen in love with the attractive woman neurology technician who conducts the experiment on your head, a helmet contraption which is supposed to somehow provoke your brain into doing something your “spirit” is usually tasked with, assuming you even believe at all or trust in that perception, and in fact accept that it exists. Artificial spiritual intelligence! “You” is the protagonist of this sci-fi philosophy novel, a romp and a scare at the same time. Fred Bourdian is a troubled virtual utopian reality game developer whose twin brother, George, his Jungian other half, is in a coma, something like virtual life and virtual death at the same time. Fred, and everybody else in this novel of big ideas, is a spiritual seeker for the 21^st century, meaning that faith or belief could be anywhere, in real or virtual worlds, in memory or in magic, in commerce or in the New Age. In Luminarium, Shakar, author of the previous novel The Savage Girl, engages the reader playfully and terrifyingly in the territory of metafiction, and of metaphysics, while telling a story of family, of brothers raised by their magician father and New Age healer mother. In his New York Times review, Christopher Beha compares Shakar to Don DeLillo, and whether this book is considering spirit or politics or technology, or all, simultaneously, Shakar’s storytelling makes his ideas urgent and compelling. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, or downloadable free for 90 days at the station’s audio archives. Support listener-sponsored anti-corporate community radio for free people!

Wednesday, September 28 WeHo Book Fair & poet David Hernandez

2011-09-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK Radio 90.7 FM in Los Angeles: Tonight’s show is devoted to celebrating and promoting the tenth annual West Hollywood Book Fair this Sunday, all day, October 2nd at West Hollywood Park and Library in the heart of beautiful West Hollywood, Ca, USA. This is a free event open to the entire Southern California community, and a fun event for bibliophiles and the people who love them. It features author readings, panels, performances, workshops and of course, books for sale, as well as food. My guests, talking about the fair, are one of the event organizers, Book Fair Director Roz Helfand, and a book fair participant, award-winning Southern California poet and Young Adult novelist David Hernandez. Roz Helfand is a non-profit organization and public policy consultant who collaborates closely with Los Angeles's creative community and is the co-founder of the West Hollywood Book Fair. Hernandez is both a YA novelist and a widely published poet, winner of the 2010 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry for his collection Hoodwinked. His two novels for young adults are Suckerpunched and No More Us for You. He lives in Long Beach and teaches at UC Irvine. Other readings and panels feature writers Hector Tobar, Susan Straight, Gary Phillips, Lisa See and KPFK’s own Maria Armoudian. For a complete schedule go to http://www.westhollywoodbookfair.org/

And follow along as Roz and I review the schedule, after David reads a couple of poems. For more on his work, visit Sarabande Books: http://www.sarabandebooks.org/?page_id=5625

Thanks for listening on the radio or online, or as a free download from the station’s archives. Please support Bibliocracy and community-sponsored anti-corporate alternative radio KPFK in the upcoming Fall 2011 Fund Drive.

Wednesday, September 21 - Cleaning Nabokov's House

2011-09-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night at 8 o’clock on KPFK 90.7 FM. My guest tonight is Leslie Daniels, a rebroadcast of a favorite show. Her debut novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House is built on an enviable writerly plot involving a variety of wish fulfillment and introduces one of the most delightful characters --- smart, sexy, literate and vulnerable --- you will ever meet. How, the novel asks, does our heroine --- a thoughtful if perhaps overly so! --- trusting American wife and mother lose her kids, find a long-lost Nabokov manuscript (or not), make new friends in an unfriendly town set against her by her ex-husband, establish a house of prostitution catering to women (!) and triumph over provincialism and paternalism to cook a nice bowl of pasta and perhaps even find love? Leslie Daniels’ short fiction has appeared widely. She is the author of a one-act play, and was for many years fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. This is one smart, funny (laugh out loud and cerebral), sexy novel. For more on Leslie Daniels see http://www.lesliedaniels.com/. Listen live on the radio or online, anytime. Downloadable for 90 days at the station website, http://www.kpfk.org.

Wednesday, 9/14 Freud's Blind Spot

2011-09-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK: Freud’s Blind Spot. My guest Elisa Albert is a novelist and short story writer, but as she confesses, happily, in the Introduction to her latest book, being an editor of an anthology has allowed her to collect other peoples’ stories, garnering insight and strength. The topic of Freud’s Blind Spot is siblings, about which one welcomes insight and strength regarding sisters and brothers in all their dependence, rivalry, confusion, devotion, with contributions from writers who bring wisdom, laughs, plenty of insecurity and doubt (and who doesn’t need more of those?) in 23 tough and honest, exuberant and funny takes on what the book’s subtitle calls “cherished, estranged, lost, hurtful, hopeful, complicated siblings.” Contributors to Freud’s Blind Spot include Steve Almond (Rock & Roll Will Save Your Life; God Bless America) and Jill Soloway (Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants), who join us for today’s show with the book’s editor, Elisa Albert, herself the author of the story collection How This Night Is Different and the novel The Book of Dahlia. Listen live on the radio in Southern California or online, anywhere in the world. Or download, free for 90 days, from the KPFK station archives. Thanks.

Wednesday, 9/7 - Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

2011-09-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on Bibliocracy: Novelist Julie Otsuka. Lauded for her previous, breakthrough book, When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka has produced in The Buddha in the Attic a brave and honest, if also ambitious and carefully stylized narrative told collectively in the voices of a group of women history calls “picture brides,” Japanese women brought to the United States at the turn of the century for arranged marriages to Japanese men. Written in a poetically minimalist documentary style, this short novel surveys the emotional and political, the personal and the historical in a chronology of moments both small and large, and paints lightly the deep meanings of the picture brides’ experiences and ours --- of adventure, abuse, loss, triumph, even love. The Buddha in the Attic seems to this reader a wonderful tonic of empathic historical revision, of truth-telling, a necessary perspective elegantly, powerfully told. This novel is a pleasure to read. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting listener-sponsored anti-corporate community radio, and for buying and reading real books. Buy this one for sure! Listen live on the radio or online. This show available as a download for free for 90 days. http://www.kpfk.org

Wednesday, August 31 - Susan Suntree

2011-08-31T07:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, my final vacation rerun, but one of the best shows I've done, thanks to a terrific guest writer. Susan Suntree, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California. When David Ulin at the LA Times mentioned earlier this year the pending arrival of what he predicted would be a landmark book about California native and natural history I didn’t realize he meant this one. It turns out I’d been lucky to have met the writer, performer and educator whose volume he was anticipating. So I am especially pleased to have an old friend and a well-known Southern California cultural and environmentalist in studio. Her name is Susan Suntree, and for many years her work has investigated the dynamics of science, art, and spirit in contemporary life and history. She is a poet and teacher, and author of Wisdom of the East: Stories of Compassion, Inspiration and Love. Susan Suntree is also founder and Artistic Director of Theatre Flux which has produced many of her performances and plays. Her one-woman performance of “The Secret History of Southern California,” a kind of epic poem-lecture-celebration is now indeed a remarkable and landmark book, one which all Southern Californians will want to own. Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California explores the prehistory and sacred geography of Los Angeles. With remarkable photos and a foreword by poet Gary Synder, Sacred Sites is part science and part mythology, an accessible, if also comprehensive history valuable to both scholars and general audiences. Susan Suntree founded FrogWorks, an eco-political street theater troupe, and is co-director of Earth Water Air Los Angeles, a giant puppet trek connecting and telling the story of endangered open spaces. When not writing and performing, she teaches at East Los Angeles College. For more on the books, see http://www.susansuntree.com/sacred_sites_la.htm

Wednesday, August 10 - More Jim Krusoe!

2011-08-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM, I’ll revisit my visit with the author of the final installment of a trio of thematically connected novels, a writer who readers of funny, smart, avant-garde literature know well, who other writers value and respect for his work as friend, colleague and booster of writing, and who students of creative writing adore for his mentorship of a long-running workshop at Santa Monica Monica College. He is also the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review, a terrific West Coast literary magazine. In Jim Krusoe’s new novel, Toward You, we return to the surreal community of St. Nils, where everything and nothingness live, this time with another lonesome bachelor protagonist --- dropout of the Institute for Mind/Body Research, furniture upholsterer and Rube Goldberg inventor --- who rescues a dying talking dog, struggles to construct a communication device with the dead and attempts love, reconciliation and forgiveness in this life and in the afterlife. What else from the author of a short story collection (Blood Lake) featuring not a metaphorical lake of blood but real blood, and two previous adventures with similarly doomed comic heroes trying to communicate, Girl Factory and Erased? Krusoe’s fiction is dream and wit, with deadpan sharpness that makes every page both wise affirmation and gratifying surprise. He is also the author of many volumes of poetry and the novel Iceland. For more visit the Tin House Books site: http://www.tinhouse.com/books/fiction-poetry/toward-you-print.html

Wednesday, August 3 - The Other Eighties...Again

2011-08-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California, a show too good not to rerun. My guest is Prof. Bradford Martin, author of The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan. Secret, indeed! Like the wars our country wages, our history is often kept secret only from U.S. citizens, who eagerly go along with the national self-deception. The cover of historian Bradford Martin’s new book --- secret history, revisionist history, people’s history --- features a collage of photographs featuring people who knew better, who objected, and who I recognized (cuz I was there, too): Nuclear Freeze marchers, anti-apartheid activists, women’s rights advocates and ACT-UP protesters. In a thoughtful review in Bookforum, David Mulcahey writes favorably about Martin’s project for in part, acknowledging the impact of this kind of now-forgotten (on purpose?) political resistance organizing: “Were it not for the exertions of a passionate few, many features we take for granted in the present political landscape would look very different. ‘It is a notable outcome of this era, for instance,’ Martin writes, "that Americans do not speak of a ‘Nicaragua War.’” Provocative, necessary, and affirming, especially if you are in one of the case studies examined by Martin, this book insists on a long view, and celebrates the legacy of grassroots activism in an era which mainstream media and popular culture give away to the Reaganoids. Brad Martin is the author of a previous book, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America and teaches at Bryant University. Thanks for listening. Listen live on the radio or online. Downloadable free for 90 days from the station’s archives. Support non-corporate commercial-free community radio in the upcoming fund drive. Like history, it belongs to all of us.

Wednesday, July 27 Duberman, Encore!

2011-07-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, at 8 PM. A special "Best of Bib," Hero worship, edition! The lives of remarkable human beings are written together and apart in the latest offering from my guest, the legendary scholar-activist Martin Duberman: two movement figures whose lives define the collective struggles for peace, justice and human rights: Barbara Deming and David McReynolds. In his newest book, A Saving Remnant, Duberman tells the radical life stories of these two brave, difficult, visionary activists, both gay, and also friends and comrades whose choices in life and politics illuminate a half-century of struggle. Himself an esteemed writer and famous gay rights activist, Martin Duberman is author of more than twenty books, and one of the Left’s most prolific men of letters, having won every major award there is. Among Martin Duberman’s most well-known work is a biography of Paul Robeson and his own landmark memoir, Cures: A Gay Man’s Oddyssey. He is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. I am proud to say that he is a personal hero of mine, so it’s a real joy to welcome Martin Duberman to Bibliocracy. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting KPFK during the recent pledge drive. This show is available for free download for the next 90 days at station audio archives.

Wednesday, July 20 - Transforming Terror

2011-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

This week on Bibliocracy, Wednesday night 8 PM, on KPFK: Susan Griffin and Karin Carrington. Griffin, longtime activist and one of our most esteemed public intellectuals and Karin Lofthus Carrington, psychotherapist and teacher, have collaborated to produce an anthology of writing meant to explore our understanding about terror, to remind us and perhaps to heal: Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World. Helpfully, the book is listed by its publisher, UC Press, as Social Problems/Comparative Religion but this remarkable collection includes an impressive lineup of contributors, literary and political and philosophical --- and a creative, even provocative critical and practical response represented in essays, poems, prayers, memoir excerpts, every kind of beautiful rhetorical examination of the problem. Writers included in Transforming Terror include Mike Davis, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Tariq Ramadan and Czeslaw Milosz. Wow! Activist-actor Peter Coyote calls the book a “collection of wisdom,” which indeed assesses exactly right the book’s mission and value. Listeners to Pacifica will know the work of Susan Griffin, author of dozens of books and articles including her A Chorus of Stones:The Private Life of War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It linked the strategy of bombing civilians with the development of nuclear weapons, an insight that provides a cornerstone for this new book. Co-editor Karin Lofthus Carrington is a psychotherapist, consultant, writer and teacher whose work focuses on the interrelationship of depth psychology, spirituality and social conscience. In clinical practice for 35 years, she’s written widely and taught graduate students at John F. Kennedy and Pacifica Universities. She was psychological consultant for the American Women’s Annapurna Expedition and co-editor of the volume Same Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness. There’s no way we could possibly talk about the entire contents of this landmark book. Go online, check out the table of contents. Buy a copy. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, July 13 - Kate Christensen, The Astral

2011-07-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Southern California: Kate Christensen. Imagination and love, faithfulness and opportunity all seem to get in the way of the protagonist of novelist Kate Christensen’s The Astral, the story of poet Harry Quirk and the circle of friends and neighbors in his Brooklyn neighborhood. You’d think he would anticipate or welcome complication, but Harry, who writes poems in formal line, is confounded --- hilariously, frustratingly, redemptively --- by the challenges, big and small, of allegiance and expectation. His grown daughter is a Dumpster-diving urban “freegan” and his shy son has joined a cult. Most surprisingly to Harry, his devoted wife of a lifetime confuses his love poems for love of another woman, and so Harry embarks on a new path, trying to figure things out, an everyman. Kate Christensen is the author of five previous novels, including The Great Man, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House and Elle. Recently she was featured on NPR’s “You Must Read This,” offering a tribute to novelist Joyce Cary and The Horse’s Mouth. Thanks for listening, and for supporting Bibliocracy and KPFK in the upcoming summer fund drive.

Wednesday, July 6 - The Nation Spring Books

2011-07-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK: The Nation magazine literary editor John Palatella. Tonight’s show is a first for Bibliocracy. I will spend the half hour talking to the person responsible for putting together the recent Spring Books issue of one of my favorite magazines, The Nation. If you’re a subscriber pull out your copy (June 6) and follow along as John Palatella guides us through a discussion of some of the standout criticism in this issue, reliably entertaining as well as exemplary of the best of long-form analysis. These include a funny, mean, smart review by Gary Greenberg of David Brooks’ The Social Animal. It’s titled “The Dumbest Story Ever Told.” The letters of Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees Yeats and her husband, one William Butler Yeats are discussed by James Longenbach. Jonathan Blitzer elaborates (“The Anatomy of a Moment”) on an almost forgotten political moment in modern Spanish history as remembered by Javier Cercas in his book, Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination. It considers a military coup attempt captured, helpfully, on video. There’s more, to read of course, and to talk about. I hope to feature conversations on books with Palatella on future shows. His own essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, London Review of Books, Bookforum and Boston Review. Not yet a Nation subscriber? Here’s how: http://www.thenation.com/. I’m confident you are a KPFK subscriber…right? Thanks for listening, and for supporting the work of your own community-sponsored radio.

Wednesday, June 29 - Brooke "On the Media" Gladstone

2011-06-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night at 8 o’clock on 90.7 FM, KPFK: Brooke “On the Media” Gladstone. I love smart comics, from How to Read Donald Duck to A People’s History of American Empire. How about a comic book offering a history of and an analysis of the mainstream media? Why not? Its author, along with artist Josh Neufeld, is co-host of one of NPR’s very best programs, called in fact “On the Media.” She is of course Brooke Gladstone who, along with co-host Bob Garfield chaperone, goad, explain to and entertain this radio geek and amateur media activist for a full hour every Sunday afternoon with their fine media analysis program (locally on KPCC). Now Gladstone has indeed written a graphic guidebook, history lesson and philosophical call to brains as regards a topic very dear to the hearts and minds of Pacifica listeners. In her new The Influencing Machine, she takes the long view, arguing that the media have always been something that we, citizens, consumers and, yes, activists could control, perhaps should control, are responsible for even as everybody complains about it. Brooke Gladstone has served as NPR’s media correspondent, Russia reporter, won every award there is. She chats with me and reads from The Influencing Machine this week on Bibliocracy.

Wednesday, June 22 - Scott Martelle: The Fear Within

2011-06-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

How is it that Bibliocracy so consistently airs shows featuring the most eclectic, smart, critical, necessary, entertaining guests? I'm too darn shy and modest to answer that one, so instead offer even more evidence in support of the startlingly obvious answer: Writer and journalist Scott Martelle! His new book, follow-up to the terrific success of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West is another riveting account of a key moment in American political history, The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial. It’s the story of the famous Smith Act Trials, and as great American political trials go, this one had it all, with enough to rival the trial of the Chicago 7 for intrigue and weirdness: the internal struggle of the Communist party, sexy spies, FBI informants, a juror writing notes for a novel, the first Ivy League-educated Mexican-American judge presiding, six – count ‘em, six radical lawyers, all of whom end up in jail themselves, the Peekskill riots and of course the back story of American politics including the landmark 1948 election, where Truman beat out his Republican challenger, benefitting from splits on the left and right from third-party challengers. In case you miss the subtext, reviewer Wendy Smith points out that Martelle’s timely storytelling “reminds us that freedom of speech and thought are most essential, not when we are feeling most confident, but when we are most afraid.” Tune in Wednesday at 8 PM, via old-fashioned FM radio or online. Download free from the KPFK station archives for 90 days. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, June 15 - Radiance: Louis B. Jones

2011-06-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California: LOUIS B. JONES. His new novel marks the return of one of the most engaging characters readers of sincere literary fiction have met in recent novels; Louis B. Jones’ always flummoxed theoretical physicist Mark Perdue of Particles and Luck, a weird science wunderkind with genius and plenty of problems. To say that Mark Perdue’s mind wanders is about as gratifyingly obvious as saying that Louis B. Jones’s prose exploration of his wandering is elegant, funny, smart and affirming. Perdue is back, shakily, trying once again to figure out the place of place, of certainty, perhaps looking to redeem himself for a tenure of happiness, some setbacks, and no startling insights to report. His daughter is gifted a teenage “American Idol”-style reality talent show vacation, a costly sort of be-a-star indulgence meant to cheer her up, set in the epicenter of dream and falsity, Los Angeles. Mark is anxious, naturally, and finds himself in exactly the wrong circumstances in which to be forced to confront existence, certainty, and meaning. By which we mean exactly the right circumstance in this funny, elegantly structured and itself joyful novel. Louis B. Jones is the author of three previous novels, and of short stories, including two recently anthologized, one in the brand-new collection from Heyday, New California Writing 2011. Listen live on the radio or online and download free for 90 days at the station’s website. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, June 8 - novelist Alan Cheuse

2011-06-07T11:34:00.001-07:00

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.

Wednesday, June 1 - Biographer Martin Duberman

2011-06-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, at 8 PM. Hero worship! The lives of remarkable human beings are written together and apart in the latest offering from my guest tonight, the legendary scholar-activist Martin Duberman: two movement figures whose lives define the collective struggles for peace, justice and human rights: Barbara Deming and David McReynolds. In his newest book, A Saving Remnant, Duberman tells the radical life stories of these two brave, difficult, visionary activists, both gay, and also friends and comrades whose choices in life and politics illuminate a half-century of struggle. Himself an esteemed writer and famous gay rights activist, Martin Duberman is author of more than twenty books, and one of the Left’s most prolific men of letters, having won every major award there is. Among Martin Duberman’s most well-known work is a biography of Paul Robeson and his own landmark memoir, Cures: A Gay Man’s Oddyssey. He is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. I am proud to say that he is a personal hero of mine, so it’s a real joy to welcome Martin Duberman to Bibliocracy. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting KPFK during the recent pledge drive. This show is available for free download for the next 90 days at station audio archives.

Wednesday, May 18 - Live & Feverish & Saintly in LA!

2011-05-18T07:47:00.001-07:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, we're up to bat for May fundraising at KPFK. Join me and Poets' Cafe co-host Lois P. Jones for pitching and gabbing and some special in-studio guests...all designed to get your support for literary arts programming at your favorite non-corporate independent community radio station. Special gift thank-you premiums from Bibliocracy include a CD of "The Fever," Wallace Shawn's remarkable play full of wit and pathos, exploring responsibility and justice. Also, we'll have limited copies available of editor David Kipen's new Los Angeles in the 1930's: The WPA Guide to the City of Angels, from UC Press. It's a reproduction of the amazing guide produced by the Works Project Administration, revealing the beautiful if often forgotten literary history of L.A with an introduction by Kipen, who will himself be a guest tonight. Pledge $75 to KPFK and receive a CD copy of "The Fever." Add $50 and receive both the play and the book for $125. Pledge more and I will personally come to your house and play the CD and then read the book to you! Or go for the Poet's Cafe pack, including a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine, a P & W tote bag, or a copy of J. Michael Walker's landmark All the Saints of the City of Angels, from Heyday Books and a must-own for any literary Angeleno. Damn, we're good! Tune in tonight and call (818) 985-5735 between 8 - 9 PM to support Bibliocracy and Poets' Cafe. Tell the volunteer phone answerer that Andrew and Lois sent you! Thanks!

Wednesday, May 4 - Spring Fund Drive

2011-05-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

No regular show today. Instead, send money! You know the drill. We remind you of the only station that matters, and you support its mission, and your own interests, by paying for it. Thanks!

May Day, Sunday at Fest of Books

2011-04-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

Bibliocracy broadcasts live from the KPFK booth (#1026) at the University of Southern California, site of this year's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on May Day! This is a free event, open to the public. Come by and watch (!) on the radio, with me, the Bibliofella, starting at 10:30 AM, followed by the usual amazing Sunday morning public affairs line-up: Ian Masters ("Background Briefing"), Maria Armoudian and Terrence McNally. My on-site guests will be (10:30) talking with me about "California writing," and include poet/cultural historian Susan Suntree (Sacred Sites: A Secret History of Southern California), novelist Victoria Patterson (This Vacant Paradise), and Gayle Wattawa, editor of Heyday's new anthology, New California Writing 2011. Then, at 12:30, I'll host a mini-roundtable on reviewing and criticism with Tom Lutz of the new Los Angeles Review of Books, Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, and an editor from BookForum. Should be fun. Listen up, or come by the booth. The rest of the weekend finds me at the Santa Monica Review booth (#982) giving out free copies of the newest issue and yakking it up with anybody who wants to talk about books, creative writing, literacy, politics, art and, yes, community radio. http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Wednesday, April 27 - Festival of Books

2011-04-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on Bibliocracy it's time to get ready for this weekend's 16th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1 at the campus of the University of Southern California. (Note new location!) KPFK is a media co-sponsor, and will broadcast live on Sunday morning. Tonight on Bib I'll run through the panels and talks with help from my guest, LA Times Books Critic David Ulin. Ulin discusses some of his favorite books nominated for the Book Prize, and we both do our very best to convince you to go to the event website and plan your weekend attendance at one of the country's premiere literary, community, cultural and political events...all wrapped up into one. See the site for schedule of both days, participants and vendors, including many bookstores and nonprofit organizations, publishers and author booths: http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/. Santa Monica Review will be there, and I'll be broadcasting live starting at 10:30, followed by Ian Masters, Maria Armoudian and Terrence McNally, the usual great Sunday morning public affairs lineup. See you at the Festival, at USC. Thanks for listening on the radio or online live, and downloadable from the KPFK station archives, free, fro 90 days.

Wednesday, April 20 - Secret 1980s

2011-04-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California my guest is Prof. Bradford Martin, author of The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan. Secret, indeed! Like the wars our country wages, our history is often kept secret only from U.S. citizens, who eagerly go along with the national self-deception. The cover of historian Bradford Martin’s new book --- secret history, revisionist history, people’s history --- features a collage of photographs featuring people who knew better, who objected, and who I recognized (cuz I was there, too): Nuclear Freeze marchers, anti-apartheid activists, women’s rights advocates and ACT-UP protesters. In a thoughtful review in Bookforum, David Mulcahey writes favorably about Martin’s project for in part, acknowledging the impact of this kind of now-forgotten (on purpose?) political resistance organizing: “Were it not for the exertions of a passionate few, many features we take for granted in the present political landscape would look very different. ‘It is a notable outcome of this era, for instance,’ Martin writes, "that Americans do not speak of a ‘Nicaragua War.’” Provocative, necessary, and affirming, especially if you are in one of the case studies examined by Martin, this book insists on a long view, and celebrates the legacy of grassroots activism in an era which mainstream media and popular culture give away to the Reganoids. Brad Martin is the author of a previous book, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America and teaches at Bryant University. Thanks for listening. Listen live on the radio or online. Downloadable free for 90 days from the station’s archives. Support non-corporate commercial-free community radio in the upcoming fund drive. Like history, it belongs to all of us.

Wednesday, April 13 - Jim "Toward You" Krusoe

2011-04-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM, I’m back, happily, with the author of the final installment of a trio of thematically connected novels, a writer who readers of funny, smart, avant-garde literature know well, who other writers value and respect for his work as friend, colleague and booster of writing, and who students of creative writing adore for his mentorship of a long-running workshop at Santa Monica Monica College. He is also the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review, a terrific West Coast literary magazine. In Jim Krusoe’s new novel, Toward You, we return to the surreal community of St. Nils, where everything and nothingness live, this time with another lonesome bachelor protagonist --- dropout of the Institute for Mind/Body Research, furniture upholsterer and Rube Goldberg inventor --- who rescues a dying talking dog, struggles to construct a communication device with the dead and attempts love, reconciliation and forgiveness in this life and in the afterlife. What else from the author of a short story collection (Blood Lake) featuring not a metaphorical lake of blood but real blood, and two previous adventures with similarly doomed comic heroes trying to communicate, Girl Factory and Erased? Krusoe’s fiction is dream and wit, with deadpan sharpness that makes every page both wise affirmation and gratifying surprise. He is also the author of many volumes of poetry and the novel Iceland. For more visit the Tin House Books site: http://www.tinhouse.com/books/fiction-poetry/toward-you-print.html

Wednesday, April 6 - novelist Meg Wolitzer

2011-04-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, novelist Meg Wolitzer. The power of a classical Greek drama challenges the contentment of the seemingly most loving and contented couple ever in a novel about an American town where contentment and expectation have become perhaps too much taken for granted. In her newest book, The Uncoupling, novelist Meg Wolitzer somehow makes relative and ordinary and easily believable the extraordinary spell cast on her characters: The magic that is the novel’s conceit is as reasonable as these characters’ everyday bewitching by other elements of our lives: language, war, technology, work, school. In The Uncoupling, the reliably wonderful Meg Wolitzer once again takes apart the assumptions of domesticity, here the intimate lives of our uncoupled couple, a town, its children and the shared stories by which they have agreed to live. The social contract and sexual politics of our moment, the way we behave in love and family, is the subject of this daring, sexy and funny book. Meg Wolitzer is the author of many novels including Surrender, Dorothy (made into a film) The Wife, The Position, and The Ten-Year Nap, which she talked about and read from on this program two years ago. Meg Wolitzer is one of my own favorite writers. Listen live on the radio or online, or download for free for 90 days from station site. Thanks.

Wednesday, March 30 - Sacred Sites

2011-03-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy: Susan Suntree, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California. When David Ulin at the LA Times mentioned some months ago the pending arrival of what he predicted would be a landmark book about California native and natural history I didn’t realize he meant the one in my hands today. It turns out I’d been lucky to have met the writer, performer and educator whose volume he was anticipating. So I am especially pleased to have an old friend and a well-known Southern California cultural and environmentalist here in studio. Her name is Susan Suntree, and for many years her work has investigated the dynamics of science, art, and spirit in contemporary life and history. She is a poet and teacher, and author of Wisdom of the East: Stories of Compassion, Inspiration and Love. Susan Suntree is also founder and Artistic Director of Theatre Flux which has produced many of her performances and plays. Her one-woman performance of “The Secret History of Southern California,” a kind of epic poem-lecture-celebration is now indeed a remarkable and landmark book, one which all Southern Californians will want to own. Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California explores the prehistory and sacred geography of Los Angeles. With remarkable photos and a foreword by poet Gary Synder, Sacred Sites is part science and part mythology, an accessible, if also comprehensive history valuable to both scholars and general audiences. Susan Suntree founded FrogWorks, an eco-political street theater troupe, and is co-director of Earth Water Air Los Angeles, a giant puppet trek connecting and telling the story of endangered open spaces. When not writing and performing, she teaches at East Los Angeles College. For more on the books, see http://www.susansuntree.com/sacred_sites_la.htm

Wednesday, March 23 - Poet Dorianne Laux

2011-03-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 o’clock on Bibliocracy: Poet Dorianne Laux, on The Book of Men.

A soldier, a lover, a detective, a late-night tv commercial huckster, Mick Jagger and even Superman. These characters are among the men considered in poems collected in the latest volume from my guest this week, Dorianne Laux. Her newest book, titled The Book of Men, is another careful and empathetic study of moments observed, and of being aware of those moments. Autobiography rises from within these poems even as they portray the lives of their subjects, as if Dorianne Laux has somehow also become the men, and women and children of these portraits, all at once, in an exchange of the power to live for the power to tell. About her Tony Hoagland says “she is one of the poets who is keeping alive the brave art of looking.” Dorianne Laux is widely published, and is the author of four previous collections of poetry. She teaches at North Carolina State University, and lives in Raleigh. Thanks for listening on the radio or online, anytime and downloadable free for 90 days at the station’s archives. http://www.kpfk.org

Wed, March 16 James Brown

2011-03-10T19:11:00.000-08:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on KPFK: This River. Personal essays by James Brown. Negotiating the territory of personal crisis is often disappointingly sensationalistic or maudlin rehash, with a trip to rehab often a visit to the land of cliché. But the insightful and honest meet the literary in James Brown’s elegantly straightforward if also meticulously crafted short autobiographical pieces, many originally appearing in literary magazines and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, GQ and the Best American Sports Writing. They are assembled now in This River. His earlier collection, the acclaimed The Los Angeles Diaries, also explored the struggle of living sober and, as he puts it, “straight and true,” as against the legacy of a damaged childhood and more loss than one person should have to handle. James Brown is the author of the novel Lucky Town and four earlier books and teaches at Cal State Bernardino. Thanks for listening. Available as a download, free, for ninety days at the station archives.

Wednesday, February 16 - Fund Drive

2011-02-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

Tonight 8 -9 PM on KPFK I'll be pitching live for a full hour on behalf of Bibliocracy and Poets' Cafe. I'll feature interviews with friends representing some terrific local literary resources whose missions reflect that of the station or otherwise advance the literary arts. And I'll be asking for your support of KPFK. Please tune in and then call (818) 985-5735, early in the hour to pledge. This cheers a host up and builds some momentum. And it will guarantee that you get the thank-you gift you really want. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting the only grassroots anti-corporate community radio station in Southern California. Remember, pledging also makes you a voting member of the station, empowering you to vote in station board elections that determine the direction of programming and policy. Subscribe for a friend. Give a gift subscription. If you can't call during my on-air hour, pledge anytime at http://www.kpfk.org.

Wednesday, February 9 - This Vacant Paradise

2011-02-09T07:53:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 8 PM my guest is Victoria Patterson, whose recent collection of interconnected short stories featured sharp social commentary, wit and style matched by empathetic characterization and elegant prose. The stories in Drift won critical acclaim and popular reception for their withering look at the difficult, compromised and stricken lives of those people of Orange County who aren’t featured in luxury real estate lifestyle magazines. Now Victoria Patterson is back with a novel further exploring questions of class, race, sex and perception in upscale Newport Beach through the life of a singular heroine, a woman facing both the limits and demands of her considerable beauty and never-realized power, and struggling with compromise and deception. In the tradition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Victoria Patterson’s This Vacant Paradise is a devastating portrait of people trapped by money, betrayed by their own families and class, trying hard to be more but who lack the emotional, not to mention material tools to succeed. Victoria Patterson’s short stories and essays have been published widely, including in the Santa Monica Review, Orange Coast, Los Angeles Times and Literary Mama. For more on Victoria Patterson and This Vacant Paradise, http://www.victoriapatterson.net/http%3A__www.victoriapatterson.net_/Victoria_Pattersons_Website.html. For more Bibliocracy, visit the KPFK station archives, where you can download programs free for 90 days. Please remember Bibliocracy during upcoming KPFK fund drive. And by "remember" I mean please send money! You can telephone your pledge in or go online and contribute. http://www.kpfk.org.

Wednesday, February 2 - Cleaning Nabokov's House

2011-01-31T22:12:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night at 8 o’clock on KPFK 90.7 FM. My guest tonight is Leslie Daniels. Her debut novel (out soon) Cleaning Nabokov’s House is built on an enviable writerly plot involving a variety of wish fulfillment and introduces one of the most delightful characters --- smart, sexy, literate and vulnerable --- you will ever meet. How, the novel asks, does our heroine --- a thoughtful if overly so --- trusting American wife and mother lose her children, find a long-lost Nabokov manuscript (or not), make new friends in an unfriendly town set against her by her ex-husband, establish a house of prostitution catering to women (!) and triumph over provincialism and paternalism to cook a nice bowl of pasta and perhaps even find love? Leslie Daniels’ short fiction has appeared widely. She is the author of a one-act play, and was for many years fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. This is one smart, funny (laugh out loud and cerebral), sexy novel. For more on Leslie Daniels see http://www.lesliedaniels.com/. Pre-order the novel now through your favorite indy bookstore. Listen live on the radio or online, anytime. Downloadable free for 90 days at the station website, http://www.kpfk.org.

Wednesday, January 26 - novelist Mark Childress

2011-01-26T09:36:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy: My special guest this week is novelist Mark Childress, who consistently finds news ways to send up what is old and familiar, that human longing and need for love, our collected failures in history and politics, our hypocrisy, and make it all --- big and small --- funny and urgent and instructive. He always accomplishes this through, naturally, the creation of memorable characters settings, not to mention satisfyingly surprising plots. In his newest novel, Georgia Bottoms we are introduced to a sexy, scheming, strong and singular woman whose duplicity is carefully managed toward achieving some bit of security in a small town in Alabama where just surviving might be the most some might hope for. Always empathetic, always funny, a master of the setup and a writer whose eye for detail and ear for conversation is always spot-on accurate, Mark Childress is the author of seven novels, most recently Crazy in Alabama, Gone for Good and One Mississippi. His articles and reviews have appeared widely, and his books have been bestsellers translated into many languages. He wrote the screenplay for the film of Crazy in Alabama, directed by Antonio Banderas and starring Melanie Griffith. A careful portrayer and enthusiastic celebrator of human foibles, he is one of the funniest writers you can read, and smartest too.

Wednesday, January 19 - Heidi Durrow

2011-01-19T09:04:00.000-08:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK. Some novels fill a niche, some create their own. Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky seems, happily to do both. Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction --- the award created by Barbara Kingsolver to writers of books dealing with social justice --- Durrow’s debut novel both meets the expectations of that award in terms of voice and content, but also challenges so much of the narrative about the nature of narrative. A multi-perspective coming of age book, a mystery, an ensemble collection of characterization and scene, and a study of how to both entertain and instruct the reader, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky has been called “a post-postmodern novel that weaves a circle of stories about race and self-discovery into a tense and sometimes terrifying whole.” Heidi Durrow graduated from Stanford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Thanks for listening, live on the old-fashioned radio or online, and downloadable free from the station archives for 90 days. Support community radio. www.kpfk.org

Wednesday, January 12 - Bummer

2011-01-12T13:24:00.000-08:00

Tonight on Bibliocracy, 8 PM on KPFK: Bummer! A pregnant punk girl-woman abandoned in Vegas by her Mohawk-sporting loser boyfriend insists on losing even more, by way of fighting somehow for what is right. That’s the problem in the wry, funny, ironic and beautiful title story of Janice Shapiro’s new collection, with the enviable title Bummer. If you immediately appreciate the deadpan name itself as a kind of comic existential premise, you will delight in these honest, confessional, self-deprecating yet heroic stories of insight into the human condition, or at least the condition of women who make a lot of bad choices toward finding wisdom. About Janice Shapiro’s stories, Charles Baxter writes: “The breath of life flows through ever one, and you can feel the heart beating very close to the surface. Terrifically smart, with a kind of comic energy that can swerve at any moment into eloquent brokenheartedness.” Love, despair, irony, these stories evoke universals but place them directly, specifically in very recognizable environments, including Southern California, where Shapiro herself grew up. Janice Shapiro’s stories have appeared in The North American Review, Santa Monica Review and The Seattle Review. A screenwriter, she co-wrote the cult film Dead Beat. A Southern Cal resident for many years, today she lives in Brooklyn. Thanks for listening on the radio at 90.7 FM or online and downloadable on the KPFK archives, www.kpfk.org.

Wednesday, January 5 - poet Anne Germanacos

2011-01-05T12:41:00.000-08:00

8 PM on KPFK: The fragmented-seeming narratives written by my guest this week offer at first individual voices and epigrammatic lines suggesting ancient inscription, references to classical mythology. A schematic almost for storytelling itself, bigger stories accumulate and culminate in an adding up of the sum of parts. The individual sections of stories in Anne Germanacos’s In the Time of the Girls work as little prose poems but together offer a unity, often breathtaking, revelatory and strong and clear, especially in their big (small) conclusions. Characters include aging, dying parents, students at a girls school in Greece, the wife of an abortion doctor murderer, tourists in Turkey, a woman who carries with her the map hung hung from the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. Names and places suggest Greek mythology and the journey. Sven Birkerts writes about In the Time of the Girls, that “Germanacos has hammered the solid of expected form to disclose the fine fracture lines that map how it really is—between men and women, women and women, myths and memories…The echoing narratives convey a rich, mysterious flow of possibility, and a sense of ancient energies pushing up into the ongoing present.” Anne Germanacos earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in both San Francisco and Greece, where the stories are mostly set. Her work has appeared in Agni online, Descant, Swink, Quarterly West and elsewhere.

Wednesday, December 29 - Leslie Brody on Jessica Mitford

2010-12-27T18:15:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night at 8 o’clock on KPFK: Leslie Brody is the author of the first ever biography of the radical civil rights activist, muckraker, bon vivant and all-around Left icon Jessica Mitford. You’ll know her reputation as, yes, an irrepressible spirit --- of radicalism, humanity and wit --- thus the title of Leslie Brody’s stunning story of Mitford’s life, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford --- and from classic books including her attack on the mortuary biz, The American Way of Death. In Irrepressible, Leslie Brody’s familiar and generous tone, sharp scholarship-driven research and elegant historical context, chart Mitford’s birth into a notorious upper class British family of political eccentrics to her death in her beloved adopted home of San Francisco and the life in-between. She was at the vanguard of just about every peace and justice movement of the latter half of the century, as a New Dealer, CPer, famous ex-Cper, to a self-taught investigative journalist of our times, scourge of the business class and hero to consumers of every political stripe. Brody’s own credentials inform the success of this book. Her memoir, Red Star Sister, is the story of a young woman growing up in a political cell, deep in counterculture and underground politics of the 1960s and 70s, a critique and an appreciation of that experience. Today Leslie Brody teaches at the University of Redlands. This is a terrific book, which tells a history of a person and a time, and how they created each other. Thanks for listening, on the radio or via the website, downloadable free for 90 days.

Wednesday, December 22 - Susan Straight

2010-12-21T13:13:00.001-08:00

Wednesday at 8 PM on Bibliocracy: Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in its entirely necessary and pleasing way in the newest novel by my guest this week, Susan Straight. In Take One Candle Light a Room, Straight engages the recent and distant past in flashbacks that make it a singular element, nearly a character in itself, along with an ensemble of dead and living family and friends related to a Los Angeles travel writer with deep roots in a desert town east of here, and even deeper roots in Louisiana via a haunting and violent story of racial and sexual injustice. The novel is an inter-generational road trip through time and a rescue story, too, all told with careful attention to idiom and speech and the vivid description of one writer, Susan Straight, composing for her heroine, the remarkable and empathetic fictional writer, one FX Antoine, whose exemplary redefinition of travel and writer make this a risky, exciting, ambitious novel. Susan Straight is the author of the breakout Aquaboogie and five subsequent novels, many celebrated, as well as short stories and essays and two books for young readers. She teaches at UC Riverside, in the city where she was born.

Wednesday, December 8 Winter Mini-Fund Drive

2010-12-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

Tonight, 8 - 9 PM it's your chance to support Bibliocracy Radio and KPFK during our Winter Mini-Fund Drive. Join me and special guest The Adventures of Unemployed Man co-author Erich Origen (in photo). Along with Gan Golan, he's created the smartest, cleverest, funniest, most inspired comic book since, well, their last collaboration, the wonderful, charming and mean Goodnight Bush. This new full-color, illustrated socio-comic masterpiece is a parody of the classic superhero comics of the Golden Age to the present, and a brilliant dissection of our current economic meltdown. If you like The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bertholt Brecht, alternative comics, Left/progressive economic analysis and funny pictures, then please call in to make a pledge tonight and ask for a copy as your thank you for supporting the singular community radio station in Southern California, and your favorite books show. (818) 985-5735.
Online anytime: www.kpfk.org

Pledge big and get the Bibliocracy Eclectic Readers' Pack, with fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics and craft. Five (5) books including:

The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen & Gan Golan
Bummer and Other Stories by Janice Shapiro
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody
Writers Workshop in a Box: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction edited by Alan Cheuse & Lisa Alvarez
California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present edited by Dana Gioia

Wednesday, Dec 1 Special Programming

2010-12-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

Bibliocracy is pre-empted tonight for special KPFK programming on WORLD AIDS DAY
KPFK will broadcast a five hour World AIDS Day special this Wednesday from 7pm to Midnight.
“ILLUMINATING THE SHADOWS: THE GLOBAL AIDS PANDEMIC 2010.”From South Africa to South Central Los Angeles, KPFK will examine the global, national and local aspects of this health crisis, looking at where the epidemic is and what is necessary to stem the tide. Rebuilding culturally competent prevention programs and educating the nation are just two areas to be explored. The Committee of Ten Thousand, a national AIDS policy and advocacy community organization founded in 1989, will provide the latest developments in policy. Produced by Coyote Radio. http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/

Wednesday, November 24 - David Ulin

2010-11-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

My guest tonight at 8 PM has lived a life of letters, first as a reader and writer, then as a critic and editor. David Ulin, book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, until recently editor of the Books section, wrote an important thought piece some months ago for that newspaper, considering what he identified as the diminished place of reading in society. He’s expanded and developed his investigation, his argument, and now has published The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. This is a thoughtful, comprehensive, step-by-step personal examination, a diagnosis of a problem and a careful answer. It’s also a survey of the reading life of one David Ulin, who is the author or editor of many books, including The Myth of Solid Ground and a seminal Los Angeles literary anthology, not to mention hundreds of reviews. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, November 17 - Pacifica Radio Archives

2010-11-17T07:53:00.001-08:00

No Bibliocracy tonight. Instead, Day Two of national fundraising effort to support the amazing work of the Pacifica Radio Archives.

Pledge online at http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/ or call (818) 506-1077. Pick a "From the Vault" premium gift: A CD collection of remarkable archives audio treasures. Bib is back next week with LA Times book critic David Ulin.

Wednesday, November 10 - Slake II

2010-11-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

Wednesday at 8 pm part two of a show featuring the new literary journal Slake, with its founder-editors Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly. In this segment reading and discussion with Slake premiere issue contributor, Southern California writer and novelist Michelle Huneven. She is the author of three novels ---Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock and a terrific short story in the premiere issue of Slake. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, and downloadable for free at the KPFK archives.

Wednesday, November 3: Slake premiere - Part I

2010-11-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 8 o’clock the first of a special two-part interview show with the editors of the new Southern California quarterly Slake, and featuring contributors to the premiere issue of the magazine. My guests include Slake founder-editors Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa, both former LA Weekly editors, writers themselves with impressive and varied histories, Ochoa at Gourmet and Donnelly at New Times and Bikini. And in the first half of this two-part edition of Bibliocracy, a reading by a Slake contributor: legendary artist, photographer and essayist C. R. Stecyk, of his “Fortress LA” photo-documentary essay. Stecyk is an artist based in Ocean Park whose work has been exhibited internationally and is included in a number of public collections. A surfboard he built and painted is in the permanent archive of the Smithsonian Institution. He has been profiled in several films, including in Dogtown and Z Boys. And, next week, in part two, of Slake-a-palooza, a reading by heavy-duty fiction contributor to the premiere issue by novelist and journalist Michelle Hunevan, author of three novels ---Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock. For more on Slake, visit the website: http://slake.la/. For more Bibliocracy (you can’t have too much!), download or listen anytime at the station’s audio archives.

Wednesday, October 27 - Peter Heller

2010-10-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Back from the fund drive, and tonight at 8 PM airing the full show with my guest Peter Heller. Poet, adventure journalist, kayaker and eco-warrior, he's racked up impressive credentials as a writer and activist. Yet Peter Heller still answered the seemingly unavoidable call to make the most of a mid-life crisis: to learn how to surf at age fifty and, simultaneously, seriously court a woman as a possible life companion. You might have seen Peter Heller’s byline in Outside, National Geographic Adventure or read his previous work, The Whale Warriors, Hell or High Water, Set Free in China or heard his commentaries on NPR. After reading Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, you'll know him that much better in this vulnerable, exciting and completely satisfying memoir-meets-eco group help (not selfish "self-help") guide to finding his own life in the waves and in the lives of others, while working for life on our planet. Listen live on the radio or on your computer. Or anytime via station archives, free and downloadable for 90 days.

Wednesday, October 13 Fund Drive!

2010-10-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Bibliocracy Tonight: Surfing, James Baldwin, Fund Drive. Eclectic, huh? Please pledge at (818) 985-5735.

Tonight it's a special Fall 2010 fund drive edition of Bibliocracy Radio. I'll be on for a full hour, 8-9 pm, playing a taped show with author Peter Heller (Kook), below, and interrupting politely to ask you to pledge, puh-leeze! Special KPFK basic membership thank you gift available during this hour of Bib is a terrific 60-minute CD from the Pacifica Radio Archives "From the Vault" series featuring the great James Baldwin. Other "add-on" gifts include books by writers soon to appear on Bibliocracy, theater tickets and, naturally, a subscription to the Santa Monica Review. Call (818) 985-5735 from 8 - 9 pm or go online. Thanks for listening, and thanks for supporting Bibliocracy and the work of your kooky host!

Poet, adventure journalist, kayaker and eco-warrior, my guest today racked up some impressive credentials as a writer and activist. Yet Peter Heller still answered the call to make the most of a mid-life crisis: to learn how to surf at age fifty and, simultaneously, seriously court a woman as a possible life companion. You might have seen Peter Heller’s byline in Outside, National Geographic Adventure or read his previous work, The Whale Warriors, Hell or High Water, Set Free in China or heard his commentaries on NPR. After reading Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, you’ll know him that much better, in this honest, vulnerable, exciting and completely satisfying memoir meets eco-group-help (not selfish "self-help") guide to finding his own life in the waves and the lives of others while working for life on our planet.

Wednesday, October 6

2010-10-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

Bib is off tonight for KPFK's fall 2010 fund drive pitching. Please note the terrific interviews and talks, lectures and other special programming offered these next 2-3 weeks...all meant to encourage your generous pledge. Call (818) 985-5735 to keep KPFK running. Listeners must certainly know that Your (Not Very) Humble Host does this show for free, no salary, no corporate Medici, no perks. My engineer, the wonderful Janine Ferguson, is a volunteer. The people who answer the phones are volunteers, listeners and subscribers like you. Bibliocracy Radio is one of only three community radio book shows in Southern California, this one with a focus on literary fiction and nonfiction, memoir, some poetry and a bit of cultural criticism thrown in. Scroll down and be impressed by recent shows and nearly 3 years of smart programming for people who read, and who like to hear conversation with writers, and reading by authors of excerpts from their work. Recent Bib guests have included journalist Bruce Watson, poet Sandra Beasley, novelist Michael Jaime-Becerra, philosopher Jack Bowen, short story writer Richard Wirick, rock and roll memoirist and bon vivant Steve Almond. Impressive huh? I am gratified that writers want to be on a radio show --- our radio show. I am proud of the diverse topics, guests I've presented. And looking forward to some great upcoming shows. So: pledge by telephone or online, anytime. Thank you! Best, the Bibliofella.

Wednesday, September 29 - Mississippi Freedom Summer

2010-09-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Wednesday evening at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. Students of Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 will read my guest Bruce Watson’s singularly comprehensive and definitive history of that campaign and be affirmed in their appreciation of it as a moment of consequence and sacrifice, provocation and redemption in America’s political story. But they --- including highly politicized Bibliocracy and KPFK listeners --- will frankly be delighted at Watson’s generous, engaging retelling of the story, and at the details and personal life stories in this revisionist appreciation and, yes, thoughtful analysis. Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, offers in its title alone Watson’s own clear, brave thesis about the efforts by young SNCC volunteers to take on not just a state, but the history of our brave, flawed republic. Writer, historian, journalist Bruce Watson is a hero of mine, for this book and for his previous, Sacco and Vanzetti, a finalist for the Edgar Award and Bread and Roses, a New York Public Library Book to Remember. About the new book, Howard Zinn wrote, “The best account I have seen of Freedom Summer.” Don’t miss the one. Next week: KPFK Fall 2010 Fund Drive. Please support Bibliocracy, a singular books show. Support KPFK, the singular voice of alternative community media in Southern California. Thanks!

Wednesday, September 22 Banned Books Week

2010-09-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

Barbara Jones, heroic librarian and Director, Office of Intellectual Freedom (ALA)

Cool Banned Books Week 2010 poster!

Through September Bibliocracy airs on Wednesday evenings at 8 PM. Now, about this week’s show: The brave and difficult, not to mention exhilarating work of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom should not need review, but, just in case, let’s consider that in response to the PATRIOT Act and other legislative efforts to redefine and legislate intellectual freedom and privacy that organization and its director, Barbara M. Jones, have been real heroes to many. And then there’s its longtime work to document efforts to limit your First Amendment right to read, freely. On the occasion of the ALA’s annual Banned Books Week, which begins this Saturday, September 25, I’m happy to indeed review its premise, the continuing need and value of this national week of actions, and to spend some time with the director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, Barbara Jones. We’ll talk about the annual list of “banned, censored and challenged” books and review the history of this grand event celebrating our right to read. Visit the ALA’s Banned Books Week 2010 site for more information: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/index.cfm

Thanks for listening to community-supported radio KPFK in Southern California. Fall fund drive begins October 5. Send money!

Wednesday, September 15 - 8 PM

2010-09-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Bibliocracy moves to a new broadcast time for the month of September: Wednesdays, at 8 PM. This week’s author is a return guest. One hundred and fifty years ago Anthony Trollope wrote a scathing social satire of political, financial, corporate scandal, The Way We Live Now. Today novelist Janelle Brown brings us This is Where We Live, a quieter, yet equally devastating story of the personal truth learned and consequences endured surrounding the mortgage loan crisis in Mount Washington, Los Angeles, California, USA. Witty and empathetic social realism, humor, careful observation of everyday life and its carefully contrived expectations --- these are the skills Janelle Brown brings to her second novel about how easily-recognized educated, talented, troubled Americans live and struggle, succeed and fail. She takes on Hollywood, real estate, private school, rock’n’roll and other class-based fantasies so easily taken for granted. Janelle Brown is the author of the bestselling All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and has written for Salon, the New York Times, Wired and Elle. Thanks for listening, and stayed tuned for further programming changes. See the station website for news. And please remember Bibliocracy when it’s time to pledge during the upcoming fall fund drive.

Wednesday, September 8

2010-08-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK: Author Richard Wirick.

Question: How to write honestly, poetically, realistically, about the weird hallucination of life under the influence, that everyday symbiotic relationship to drugs experienced by so many of us, to painkillers, heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, valium, oxycontin? Answer: The thematically connected short stories in Kicking In, the newest collection by my guest this week. They are described by poet Nick Flynn as “distilled, brutal beauty, written with cold-eyed fierceness.” Indeed, that rhetorical, stylistic gambit --- telling the truth (!) about the alternatately benign, fatal, gruesome and, it seems, mystical connection to addiction, recreation and relief makes Kicking In one of my favorite recent finds, a book of both sociological truth-telling and artful portrait of a nation of junkies. Richard Wirick is author of a previous collection called One Hundred Siberian Postcards and articles and stories which have appeared widely, including in Playboy, Fiction, Chicago Review. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, and downloadable for free for ninety days at the station’s website. Support Bib and community radio. Become a member sponsor of KPFK. www.kpfk.org

Wednesday, August 25 - Orange Sunshine Flashback!

2010-08-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 pm on KPFK. This week we air the last of summer reruns. New shows next Wednesday, but meanwhile here's a great one. My guest is Nick Schou, an investigative journalist who has written a book so unbelievable as to challenge the premise of so much “counter-culture” history, not to mention credulity. His Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World takes on the apocryphal-seeming story of a group of surfer-hippies who are either criminals or prophets, or both, social experimenters of the late 60’s and early 70’s who embraced mind-altering LSD and mescaline, marijuana as a kind of sacrament. Or were they only petty crooks and hustlers? Schou locates the founding of the famous “hippie mafia” in, yes, the foothills of Orange County of all places, and traces their relationship to media court jester-guru-FBI informant Timothy Leary and the establishment of Laguna Beach as hippie Mecca and drug-selling hub. This is just plain fun, when it is not alarming and weird, with smuggling stories and other adventures of the underground. Schou is a terrific writer, full-time staffer at OC Weekly. His writing has also appeared in numerous weeklies over the past decade, including LA Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Washington City Paper, the Sacramento News & Review, and the Village Voice. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, a book which found a very welcome audience at KPFK. Thanks for listening!

Wednesday, August 11 - Jack Bowen, Encore!

2010-08-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK is Jack Bowen. This show was one of the Bib audience's favorites, so I am pleased to offer it for summer weeks of encore shows. Bowen is the author of a book you'll want to keep in the glove compartment, and otherwise close, as it is a practical philosophical primer taking on as its vehicle (sorry for pun) for considering our culture, politics and worldviews...the bumper sticker. In If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, Bowen, a philosopher, does a take-apart of why and how we choose to see the world, from Plato to "My Child Beat Up Your Honor Student," the two being, he argues, connected. About this book Christopher Hitchens writes, “In the sense of being pregnant with meaning, this book has a baby on board.” Jack Bowen teaches philosophy at Menlo School in Atherton, California, and runs the Stanford Summer Philosophy Camp. He will be featured along with Richard Dawkins and Leonard Susskind in an upcoming documentary, "The Nature of Existence." His first book, a philosophical novel titled The Dream Weaver, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. We sure have some fun here at Bibliocracy Radio, don't we? Engaging topic, smart guest, charming host...all on So Cal's only community-sponsored anti-corporate free radio station. Listen live, online or download later.

Wednesday, August 4 - Encore, Daniel Olivas

2010-08-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on Bibliocracy I replay my recent show featuring writer Daniel Olivas. His collection, Anywhere But L.A. is out now, and a short-short story of his is also included in a beautiful new anthology from Norton called Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. Olivas is the author of five books of fiction and editor himself of the landmark anthology, Latinos in Lotusland. His first full-length novel, The Book of Want, will be published by the University of Arizona Press. Olivas’s writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the L.A.Times, THEMA, The Jewish Journal, Exquisite Corpse, New Madrid, MultiCultural Review and the El Paso Times, where he reviews books. Finally, Daniel Olivas blogs each Monday on La Bloga, an online Latino literary arts collective. Today he reads from a variety of his fabulist fiction, short stories which develop out of an appreciation of realistic detail yet build into elaborations of mythic and fairy tale proportion. Thanks for listening. Archived for 90 days, free at the station’s website.

Wednesday, July 28 - Christie Hodgen

2010-07-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

This week on Bibliocracy: Telling one story in a novel is challenging enough, engaging enough, but in her novel of five interconnected stories --- elegies for an uncle, a town boy, a college dorm-mate, a heartbroken aesthete, and a doomed mother --- author Christie Hodgen creates a remarkable second and third project: fictional biographies which, in their telling, also take us on the life-journey of our narrator and, in its totality, a book which works almost like a puzzle until the final chapter. Will the narrator-heroine, Mary Murphy, find her own story as she offers portraits, judgments, remembrances of those she survives? Will she find her missing sister and reconcile with her nutty, much-married and now rehabilitated mother? Elegies for the Brokenhearted is a novel so perfect, fluid and yet intimate in its characterizations, that this reader wished, perversely, for more dead people (!), just for the pleasure of reading Ms. Hodgen’s remarkable prose. Christie Hodgen’s short stories appear widely, and she is author of Hello, I Must Be Going and A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw. She won the AWP Award for Short Fiction and the Pushcart Prize and teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. This is one of my favorite novels in a while. I hope that, like me, you will after reading and delighting in this book want to go back and read Hodgen’s earlier work. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, or anytime you like, free, as a download at www.kpfk.org. Select “show” and find recent Bibs.

Wednesday, July 21 - Sandra Beasley

2010-07-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on Bib I'll host poet Sandra Beasley. She is author of a collection which won last year’s Barnard Women Poets Prize. Chosen by judge Joy Harjo, the poems collected in I Was the Jukebox are written by a young if established poet with already impressive credentials, an impressive, sly, funny and playful voice. About her choice of this prizewinning collection Harjo writes “Every object, icon or historical moment has a soul with a voice” and, indeed, the premise of this arrangement of poems suggests speaking, testifying, observing, complaining --- by flowers, sand, mythical creatures, eggplants, pianos, even war...all have their say, beginning with the jukebox itself. Sandra Beasley is the author of a previous collection, Theories of Falling. Her work has appeared widely, and she is completing a memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, due out in 2011. Watch and listen to Beasley's work on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCYM2sf4NBA

Thanks for listening. Read poetry. Buy books. Buy poetry. Support the arts.

Wednesday, July 14 - Steve Almond

2010-07-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 PM from the strongest, loudest, head-bangin’-est community radio station in the world…ladies and gentlemen, Steve Almond. Of course you know his work, and if you don’t, well, pretend to. And then become an instant fan. Almond is a funny, smart social commentator, whose clever short stories and novel have made him a popular and famous writer-personality-bon vivant and, because his writing is so sharp and engaging, a force for literary good too. Almond is author, most recently of (Not that You Asked), the nonfiction Candyfreak, a groundbreaking short story collection or two, and a novel. He’ll read from and talk about his latest project, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, charting his life as a Drooling Fan and critic of music, musicians and rock’n’roll. He’s created a website with music (Bitchin’ Soundtrack) and you can watch him read a hilarious excerpt (Video) to a grateful audience at http://www.stevenalmond.com/. Thanks for listening, on the radio, online or later, archived.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - Sudden Fiction Latino

2010-07-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 PM on KPFK. Today a special performance edition of the show, with an opportunity to celebrate a wonderful new anthology with its editor, a man who’s blazed a particular trail as regards a singular genre. Robert Shapard has been part of a team of editors who’ve made the short-short story, or sudden fiction, their own. With James Thomas and now co-editor Ray Gonzalez, he’s responsible for Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction (Continued), Sudden Fiction International and, now, Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. With me in the studio and on the telephone are three contributors to the new anthology reading their short-short stories in their entirety. Ain't community-sponsored non-commercial radio great? Shapard himself won a national chapbook competition with a collection of seven short-short stories, called Motel and Other Stories. Reading their work are novelist and nonfiction author Luis Alberto Urrea (The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The Devil’s Highway) and short story writers Andrea Saenz and Lisa Alvarez. Listen live on the radio, or online. Archived at the station site, and downloadable free for 90 days.

Wednesday, June 9 Summer Fund Drive

2010-06-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

KPFK phone volunteers

My hero

Summer Fund Drive at KPFK starts today. I'll host a special one-hour literary arts Wednesday hour with Program Director Alan Minsky from 2-3 pm. Call (818) 985-5735 to support poetry, fiction, nonfiction and memoir on the radio. I'll speak with friends of "Bibliocracy" and offer special premiums including a nifty poetry anthology from Heyday Books, subscriptions to Santa Monica Review and a CD from the Pacifica Archives of the great James Baldwin. And more. You can also pledge online. http://www.kpfk.org. Thanks for all your support. In nearly two years it's been my joy to present Greil Marcus, Diane Lefer, Jim Krusoe, Katha Pollit, Al Young, Michelle Latiolais, Dylan Landis, Paul Auster, Michael Jaime-Becerra and dozens more writers. Scroll through the blog archives and be impressed, once again. Pledge big, please, to support the work of the singular community-run community radio station...for 50 years!
And do mention that you are a fan of this program and its charming host.

Wednesday, June 2 - Deborah Heiligman

2010-06-01T19:18:00.001-07:00

Today on Bibliocracy: Emma Wedgwood loved Charles Darwin and God, too. And Darwin loved Emma Wedgwood. The scientist shared his doubts and his famous research with his loving young wife, who worried about his “soul” even as the two of them raised a family and her husband collected specimens and studied barnacles and insects in the backyard. In her prizewinning Young Adult biography of this remarkable pair, author Deborah Heiligman tells a heroic, touching story of lovers who were equals, and who shared a relationship built of deep trust and devotion. An elegant and entertaining telling of their amazing life story, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith has been nominated for all kinds of awards, and no surprise, as Deborah Heiligman has written dozens of other terrific books for young people, many of them about science and religion. This one is for everybody, young and old.

Wednesday, May 26 Essayist John D'Agata

2010-05-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 has been praised as an innovator whose contribution to the essay form is lyricism and complexity, and a writer whose prose offers a kind of reassesment of consciousness. But he is also a terrific storyteller, whose ambition is fully realized in juxtaposing detail, character, information and memoir to create work that is poetic and accessible, not to mention honest. In John D’Agata’s newest book, About a Mountain, the writer investigates the impossible contradictions of science and imagination at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the proposed storage site for U.S. nuclear waste. He juxtaposes this big story with the death by suicide story of a teenager living in nearby Las Vegas, a city D’Agata portrays as so impossibly fake and contrived that it makes life there as we know it nearly as strange a premise as that of the nuclear waste storage facility. John D’Agata is the author of Halls of Fame and editor of The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

Wednesday, May 19 Mini-Fund Drive

2010-05-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

No Bib this week. Instead, please pledge big-time to support the work of your favorite bibliofella, the authors I've brought to the show, and the only non-corporate people's community radio station in Southern California. I know, it's a hobby among listener-sponsors to critique and evaluate and sometimes complain about our (!) station, but consider: KPFK is the only station in Southern California with a poetry show, a disability awareness show, a children's story and song show, programming by and about GLBT activists, not to mention the very best in public affairs and music and media analysis, not to mention the amazing Pacifica Archives. (I love to mention all of it, over and over again!) So, please, pledge your little hearts out, friends. Mention Bibliocracy, yes, do, sure, why not? This show is one where you hear writers read their own work, in extended performance of excerpts from novels, nonfiction, criticism, history, memoir, poetry and short stories. Scroll down to be helpfully reminded of the terrific artists you've heard on Bibliocracy. Thanks! --- at

Wednesday, May 12 - Michael Jaime-Becerra

2010-05-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK is Michael Jaime-Becerra. He is an internationally-acclaimed fiction writer who grew up in El Monte, California and whose writing makes beautiful and elegant the harsh, complicated lives of working-class people. After the remarkable success of his collection Every Night is Ladies’ Night, he’s written a novel, This Time Tomorrow, a book with the characterization and plot of Chekhov and the detailed description, setting and careful celebration of place you’d expect in a novel of social realism. It takes place in Southern California, with visits to familiar locales including the LA Flower Mart, downtown music clubs, Legg Lake, and captures moments of culture and everyday life in Southern California that readers will easily fall into. Michael Jaime-Becerra is an elegant writer whose prose doesn’t flinch at truth or miss a chance to be sad, beautiful and redemptive. He is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at UC Irvine and now teaches Creative Writing at the UC Riverside.

Wednesday, May 5 - Orange Sunshine!

2010-05-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 pm on KPFK. My guest this week is Nick Schou, an investigative journalist who has written a book so unbelievable as to challenge the premise of so much “counter-culture” history, not to mention credulity. His Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World takes on the apocryphal-seeming story of a group of surfer-hippies who are either criminals or prophets, or both, social experimenters of the late 60’s and early 70’s who embraced mind-altering LSD and mescaline, marijuana as a kind of sacrament. Or were they only petty crooks and hustlers? Schou locates the founding of the famous “hippie mafia” in, yes, the foothills of Orange County of all places, and traces their relationship to media court jester-guru-FBI informant Timothy Leary and the establishment of Laguna Beach as hippie Mecca and drug-selling hub. This is just plain fun, when it is not alarming and weird, with smuggling stories and other adventures of the underground. Schou is a terrific writer, full-time staffer at OC Weekly. His writing has also appeared in numerous weeklies over the past decade, including LA Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Washington City Paper, the Sacramento News & Review, and the Village Voice. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, a book which found a very welcome audience at KPFK. Thanks for listening!

Wednesday, April 28 - Daniel Olivas

2010-04-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on Bibliocracy I celebrate writer Daniel Olivas. His collection, Anywhere But L.A. is out now, and a short-short story of his is also included in a beautiful new anthology from Norton called Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. Olivas is the author of five books of fiction and editor himself of the landmark anthology, Latinos in Lotusland. His first full-length novel, The Book of Want, will be published by the University of Arizona Press. Olivas’s writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the L.A.Times, THEMA, The Jewish Journal, Exquisite Corpse, New Madrid, MultiCultural Review and the El Paso Times, where he reviews books. Finally, Daniel Olivas blogs each Monday on La Bloga, an online Latino literary arts collective. Today he reads from a variety of his fabulist fiction, short stories which develop out of an appreciation of realistic detail yet build into elaborations of mythic and fairy tale proportion. Thanks for listening. Archived for 90 days, free at the station’s website.

Wednesday, April 21 --- Festive with David Ulin

2010-04-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK: It's springtime in Southern California and the books are in bloom. This weekend, Sat-Sun, April 24 & 25, the Los Angeles Times hosts its 15th annual "Festival of Books" on the campus of UCLA. I'll chat with guest David Ulin, Books editor, on his own writing, on reading, on the Times Book Prize nominees and, yes, some highlights from the upcoming two-day biblio-thon of panels, readings and interviews. For complete schedule of events visit the site.
Note: "Bibliocracy" will broadcast LIVE from the KPFK booth, at 1:30 pm on Sunday, following Suzi Weissman, Terrence McNally and Ian Masters. So if you can't be there, tune in for special programming and reports from the dugout. More about my guest: David Ulin is one of the smartest fellows you can meet. Besides editing, he is himself the author of three books and in this interview with me reads from a commentary he is developing into another. Ulin is moderating panels this weekend and interviewing the mighty Dave Eggers. See you at the Festival! And please do stop by the KPFK booth (213) or Santa Monica Review booth (504) and say hello. http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Wednesday, April 14 - Jack Bowen

2010-04-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

My guest Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK is Jack Bowen. He is the author of a book you'll want to keep in the glove compartment, and otherwise close, as it is a practical philosophical primer taking on as its vehicle (sorry for pun) for considering our culture, politics and worldviews...the bumper sticker. In If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, Bowen, a philosopher, does a take-apart of why and how we choose to see the world, from Plato to "My Child Beat Up Your Honor Student," the two being, he argues, connected. About this book Christopher Hitchens writes, “In the sense of being pregnant with meaning, this book has a baby on board.” Jack Bowen teaches philosophy at Menlo School in Atherton, California, and runs the Stanford Summer Philosophy Camp. He will be featured along with Richard Dawkins and Leonard Susskind in an upcoming documentary, "The Nature of Existence." His first book, a philosophical novel titled The Dream Weaver, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. We sure have some fun here at Bibliocracy Radio, don't we? Engaging topic, smart guest, charming host...all on So Cal's only community-sponsored anti-corporate free radio station. Listen live, online or download later.

Wednesday, April 7 - Stephanie Brown/Lit Orange

2010-04-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Today at 2:30 PM on Bibliocracy my guest is acclaimed poet Stephanie Brown, author of two volumes, Allegory of the Supermarket and, most recently, Domestic Interior. Join me to celebrate her work as a remarkable American poet who just happens to live in Orange County, and to help promote this weekend's now annual literary celebration of said county, Literary Orange, which she is organizing. This writer is a variety of full-time cultural worker --- in her day job Stephanie Brown works as a librarian for the county of Orange. Among other publications, Brown has published in American Poetry Review, and won the magazine's Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and recent anthologies including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Grand Permission: Essays on Poetry and Motherhood. She’s taught creative writing at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. And Stephanie Brown has indeed worked as a public librarian since 1989, currently a Senior Branch Manager for the Orange County Public Library system. I taped this show in her office, where we also chatted about this Saturday’s Literary Orange conference at UCI, featuring keynote speakers Dean Koontz and Karen Joy Fowler, with panels and book signings. For more information on Literary Orange go to http://www.literaryorange.org/. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, March 31 - Nick Flynn Encore!

2010-03-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

I'm airing this one again as you might have missed it in the wake of the recent fund drive. (Thanks!) Also, it's a good one, largely because my guest is an amazing writer and human being. Nick Flynn’s first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a favorite of mine, has won awards and been translated into thirteen languages. It further established his reputation, built on work now including two volumes of poetry, a play and essays. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, on NPR’s This American Life and in the New York Times Book Review. In his new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn’s poetic construction of a kind of journal of pain, of torture, and of a dark childhood, of his own failures and betrayals, finds focus in the reality and metaphor of torture, especially the torture of prisoners as revealed in the Abu Ghraib photographs, those defining elements of the so-called War on Terror. The Ticking is the Bomb is a startlingly honest, lyrical, polemical journey of self-discovery, a deeply affecting book. Wednesday, 2:30 on KPFK.

Wednesday, March 24 - Chris Bachelder

2010-03-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at 2:30 on KPFK. Today I booster a novel I admire a whole lot, and talk to its author, of whom I am a big fan. If I had a list of recent favorite books (and, of course, I do!) , Chris Bachelder’s two novels would both be on it. His first, Bear v. Shark, established Bachelder's voice and energy in a satirical and funny documentary style which took apart the Society of the Spectacle, the alienation of the virtual and commercial life of our weird nation. His 2006 novel U.S. for, yes, United States, but mostly for Upton Sinclair, brought the muckraking and often underestimated literary icon of leftist reform (and California gubernatorial candidate --- who lost, of course) back to life in each chapter, only to find him murdered by a new generation of reactionaries. So, to celebrate the work of a writer for whom I think KPFK listeners especially will find an affinity, and whose writing just makes me a very happy bibliofella, I am pleased to present novelist Chris Bachelder on Bibliocracy Radio. And, lucky us, he also reads from brand new work toward the end of the program. Listen live on the radio or online. Download, free for 90 days from the KPFK archives. And find me now on Facebook. Thanks for listening.

Wednesday, March 17 - Looking for Calvin and Hobbes

2010-03-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

Today at 2:30 on community radio for Southern California, KPFK 90.7 FM: For ten years comics artist Bill Watterson produced one of the best and most beloved comic stips ever, a smart and charmingly subversive epic story about a boy and his stuffed tiger. Then Watterson quit drawing, and withdrew from public life, famously refusing to license his work and offering in his action an apparent critique of celebrity, fame and the fetishizing of art. In its run, of three thousand strips, Calvin and Hobbes made millions of fans, among them my guest today, Nevin Martell, whose book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, searches ostensibly, for the very private Watterson, More than that, Martell tells the story --- completely unauthorized of course --- of the man and his contribution to comics and culture. Thanks for listening!

Wednesday, March 3 - Nick Flynn

2010-03-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Nick Flynn’s first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a favorite of mine, has won awards and been translated into thirteen languages, and further established his reputation, built on work now including two volumes of poetry, a play and essays. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, on NPR’s This American Life and in the New York Times Book Review. In his new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn’s poetic construction of a kind of journal of pain, of torture, and of a dark childhood, of his own failures and betrayals, finds focus in the reality and metaphor of torture, especially the torture of prisoners as revealed in the Abu Ghraib photographs, those defining elements of the so-called War on Terror. The Ticking is the Bomb is a startlingly honest, lyrical, polemical journey of self-discovery, a deeply affecting book.

Wednesday, February 10 - Fund Drive

2010-02-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

Fund drive continues. Support your station!

Wednesday, February 3 Fund Drive

2010-02-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T16:21:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-29T05:36:00.000-08:00

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.