Wednesday, June 4 - KEM NUNN

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio, 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM:  KEM NUNN.  My guest tonight is a favorite Southern California son and a favorite author, who 30 years ago wrote a beautiful and enduring book about our region called Tapping the Source, embraced and celebrated as a Raymond Chandleresque surf novel set in the scariest and darkest and, simultaneously most sublime places of coast and desert, including old Huntington Beach.  It became an instant classic.  Then there was Unassigned Territory (1986), Pomona Queen (1992), The Dogs of Winter (1997) and, most recently, Tijuana Straits, that book a kind of eco-thriller, but all of them written with the style of a literary artist who redefines our region and challenges our expectations. In his newest novel, Chance, Kem Nunn mashes up mathematics, brain injury, multiple personalities, parenthood, with a winning protagonist who trespasses by way of ethics and love and his own moral code, a medical man who offers his expertise in forensic neuropsychiatry, of all things.  Chance is also the darkest buddy movie novel premise you can imagine, with a charismatic urban warrior criminal to conspire with or enable the deeply troubled and compromised anti-hero, along with the ultimate femme fatale, all of it offered in a lovingly skeptical take-apart of the Bay Area, a noirish mystery with suggestions of “Vertigo” and plenty of stylish, smart prose.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, and as a free download from the station’s audio archives.  And thanks to radio station KUCI, where this show was recorded.