Wednesday, July 31 - Dagoberto Gilb of Huizache

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  Dagoberto Gilb, co-founder of HUIZACHE, a new literary journal.  Yes, the arrival of a new lit mag is a happy enough occasion but one founded with a particular vision, arguably a political one, and a cultural critique, and a mission, by a writer whose own struggles and successes have made him both militant and generous?  I must be talking about Huizache and its founder, literary lion Dagoberto Gilb.  He’s the much-acclaimed prize-winning novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in Harpers and the New Yorker, and in eight books, including Woodcuts of Women and, most recently, Before the End, After the Beginning. Sponsored by CentroVictoria, the first two issues of Huizache, with contributors from Lorna Dee Cervantes, Gary Soto, Margaret Randall and Naomi Shihab Nye (as well as newer names) are still available, and you can subscribe to this important new journal – with its third issue on the way - at its website, here:  http://www.centrovictoria.net/huizache.html

Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or as a free download anytime you like.  Friend me and KPFK on Facebook, and please get out your credit card now in anticipation of our summer mini-fund drive.  

Wednesday, July 24 - Karen Joy Fowler

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  KAREN JOY FOWLER.  My guest tonight is the author of a bestselling first novel which in its embrace of feminist politics, genre, idiom, challenged and delighted, inviting in so many readers to her worldview and making overnight longtime fans of the author of Sarah Canary.  That first book by Karen Joy Fowler, published in 1991 arrived after publication of science fiction and other short stories, and before her big-time book, The Jane Austen Book Club, with her award-winning story “What I Didn’t See” in there, just to make things interesting. In her latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, we are offered yet another wrty, human, provocative invitation to learn what really happened, reconsider the facts, read the version as told by the protagonist of another story of secrets revealed, toward understanding the meta-power of powerful storytelling.  All of that on top of the delicious details of the story itself, this one about two "sisters" with a unique and enduring variety of sibling rivalry as it is constructed, unintentionally by their scientist father. This is a seriously funny book, entertainingly serious social criticism, thoughtfully and politically provocative family story.  Need more convincing? See my recent review at OC Bookly: 
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/06/karen_joy_fowler.php 

Wednesday, July 17 - David Margolick on J.H. Burns

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  DAVID MARGOLICK.  I read, eagerly, the latest from my guest tonight based solely on a favorite book he wrote some years ago, one of those small, perfect, complete stories which stays with you because it succeeds in every way.  That was Strange Fruit:  The Biography of a Song, about the ballad of lynching written by Abel Meeropol and sung most famously by Billie Holiday.  Its author, David Margolick, has written plenty since, but I am catching up with him tonight on the occasion of his biography of a literary character with whom most of us are unfamiliar, a mostly forgotten and in many ways unattractive personality, an important and talented and fascinating American writer.  In Dreadful:  The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick both introduces and attempts to explain the “dreadful” – as in the colloquial “gay” as in homosexual slang - for a difficult and weirdly exemplary life by the author of one of the once most acclaimed World War II novels by an American, The Gallery.  This is in fact writer David Margolick’s fifth book.  He is also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online or anytime you like as a free download from the station archives.  Buy a book today.  This book!  Find me on Facebook.    

Wednesday, July 10 "Film Night" with Peter Rainer

Wednesday night on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM:  Film critic PETER RAINER. Being challenged, taught, entertained by a generous and smart critic is a valuable thing, not to mention being affirmed by way of a smart political analysis that sort of reflects your own!  Veteran and award-winning film critic Peter Rainer’s writing on the movies has in 30 years earned him a big following, through his work at the old Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, and for this loyal fan especially at the weekly “Film Week” show on KPCC, where so many rely on his funny, sharp, artful analysis of film and all its collateral meaning.  Rainer writes today for the Christian Science Monitor and, lucky for us, many of his essays and reviews are collected in a new volume from Santa Monica Press titled Rainer on Film:  Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.  The story of the movies as discussed, interpreted by Peter Rainer is indeed the story of the past weird and wonderful three decades, and it is a well-told story by a film writer who writes elegantly, authoritatively and humorously across disciplines, with style and insight.  But you already knew that if you hear him on the radio or read his newspaper reviews.  Thanks for listening on the radio, or online, or anytime you darn well please on electronic contraptions which you can plug in to the station archives.

Wednesday, July 3 - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Wednesday night at 8 on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM:  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE.  My guest this week is celebrated worldwide for her literary ambassadorship on behalf of curiosity, candor, keen observation and urgent storytelling with both ambitious reach and accuracy.  Her confident, complex and richly detailed prose arrives with gravitas and humor, politics and the interconnectedness of perspectives which seem to demand one another.  I have not been so convinced by a writer of the verity of her portrayals about how we are living, seeing, thinking since reading Doris Lessing.  Yes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is my guest tonight, and what a lucky host I am.  Author of the previous novels Half of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, Adichie has earned both prizes and critical acclaim, as well as an international following.  She is the recepient of a MacArthur Fellowship and author of a short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck.   In her newest, Americanah, the construction of a two principle characters across time and place accommodates elegantly her keen and provocative analysis of life on three continents.  One of the best books of the year.  Thanks for listening on the radio, or online, or as a free download from the station archives.  “Friend” me on Facebook, why dontcha?

Wednesday, June 26 - Poet Andrew Allport

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ANDREW ALLPORT.  My guest this week is a young poet whose debut collection won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize, a very big deal from Western Michigan University Press and judge poet David Wojahn.  Andrew Allport’s the body / of space / in the shape of the human is a smart, sharp accounting of absence and loss, but always reckoning on possibility and a sometimes ironic but urgent call to attentiveness and creation:  “What today is killed on the page still survives in the world where no one reads.”  In a poem set at a local Buddhist meditation retreat, Allport makes a Zen funny while also calling out the artist and the reader, and perhaps a society chockfull of the virtual, and its endless absence.  Beginning as an elegy for a lost father and ending in the rich environs of the natural and man-made natural world of the Romantics, Allport introduces history and philosophy and humor to show us fullness and absence together.  Andrew Allport holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  His reviews, poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of an earlier chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels and he teaches at USC.  Thanks for listening, for purchasing books by guests of this show, and for supporting your, our community-sponsored alternative radio.  

Wednesday, June 19 - Tom Lutz, LA Review of Books

Tonight on Bibliocracy, on KPFK 90.7 FM at 8 PM:  TOM LUTZ.  My guest is local literary hero Tom Lutz, a friend of readers and writers.  His Los Angeles Review of Books has in two years since its online debut not just filled the gap created with the loss of so many regular newspaper book review venues, but established a community of cultural workers well beyond being only an alternative. LARoB is a collective invention of mind and spirit that defines literary life in our region and beyond. As Founding Editor-in-Chief, Lutz brought on board the LA Review of Books website dozens of talented Southern California writers, offering essential reviews, essays and interviews.  Organized as a non-profit reader-supported online journal, where critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers and scholars convene and celebrate the life of the mind, LA Review of Books is committed, as its mission statement declares “to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness and the power of the written word.”  Dig it.  Tom Lutz is a teacher – at UC Riverside-  a critic, and reviewer. He is also the author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.  Join me in conversation with the Founding Editor in Chief of everybody’s favorite literary arts website, the Los Angeles Review of Books, soon to be a quarterly hard copy magazine in addition to an essential online resource for bibliophiles, activists, thinkers and creative Angelenos everywhere.  Not yet discovered LARoB?  Here’s the link, friends: http://lareviewofbooks.org/.  Donate, subscribe, share.