Subtitled an “intimate history,” writer Alex Espinoza tells history intimately indeed — closely, credibly, personally — in his new book, Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. The celebrated novelist examines a radical pastime and retells the long story of the transgressive, thrillingly subversive, affirming act of looking for and finding sex in public […]

Cultural historian Lisa Duggan has written a small, perfect book which accomplishes so much in only a few pages, with irony and wit, humor and insight. In her newest, titled Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed she both explores the actual work and philosophy, politics and writing of the ubiquitous if odious […]

The poet, naturalist, fiction and nonfiction writer Charles Hood is a friend of this program, and a go-to expert and exemplar of all kinds of writing, all excellent.  He’s appeared on Bibliocracy most recently to discuss, and celebrate A Californian’s Guide to the Birds Among Us, from Heyday and, before that, his meaningfully experimental and […]

Susan LeTempa is back, with Volume 3 of her incredible series from Prospect Park Books, Paperback LA:  A Casual Anthology.  This one is, titled, joyfully “Secrets, Sigalerts, Ravines, Records.”  Once again, this compendium meets literary-artistic collage includes both new discoveries and reminders, with a multi-form collection including fiction, nonfiction, photography, lists, a free-form provocation which, […]

This week my guest on Bibliocracy Radio is the veteran journalist and investigative historian Julia Flynn Siler. In her newest, she tells multiple stories explaining, uncovering, dramatizing the efforts by late 19th century reformers to advocate for women sold into servitude, and the history of a decades-long proto-feminist human rights abolition campaign in San Francisco’s […]

Bibliocracy Radio is back after KPFK’s fund drive, celebrating community support for smart books and lively conversation with a show featuring The Comma Queen, Sunday, 5 PM on 90.7 FM. Her life and life-work, passion for others’ writing and, lately, her own celebrated writing, have indeed made Mary Norris literary royalty.  As The Comma Queen, […]

This week on Bibliocracy I share my interview with novelist Nina Revoyr, taped at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the campus of U.S.C. Revoyr has in five previous novels found new ways to examine, illustrate, dramatize and critique class, race, social and anti-social life in Southern California. In her newest, with […]

What sort of story, and storytelling results from the practice of poetry, autobiography, journalism, photography, political analysis and the imagination each and all exercised simultaneously to present and rearrange in episodes and in scenic prerogative?  Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues, her debut novel, stymies easy categorization, but in its formal embrace […]

This week, Sunday at 5 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM: A celebration of Slaughterhouse-Five. Of all the reasons to share books, reading, literary culture on the radio, today’s show comes perhaps closest, more urgently, personally and satisfyingly to the best one.  Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has described Kurt Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who […]

My guest this week has written an authoritative, entertaining and critically important collective biography which explains so much of our recent history.  In pursuing his — and my own! — passionate interest in and devotion to The Weavers, most famously featuring the late Pete Seeger, author Jesse Jarnow delivers us our musical roots, the blacklist […]