My guest this week is back with part two of her four-volume anthology series meant to make you a committed fan if a “casual” reader of LA’s literary and cultural history, legacy, even current moment.  This project must be some kind of a dream come true for editor Susan La Tempa, as her surprising and […]

Sunday, 5 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM. L.A. Kauffman is an activist-organizer, journalist and a variety of people’s historian and cultural critic.  She’s been close to movements, campaigns, protests and the people who make them for thirty years, and authored an important and fun book on direct action, featured on this show, as well written […]

This week: Richard Wirick, author of The Devil’s Water, 5 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM. Question: How is it possible for a writer to integrate so many varied and ostensibly contradictory lives into one, and to make the juxtapositions, contradictions, impossibly perfect poetry of pain and estrangement into prose which not only convinces but […]

My guest this week on Bibliocracy has written the improbably redemptive prequel to a sad history we know all too well, a fiction meets facts meets fantastical and sweet real-life friendship story. You’ll recognize the actual people who live at the famous Dakota apartments in early Reagan-era New York, including John and Yoko, and soon […]

My guest this week (Sunday, 5 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM) is a short story and screenplay writer with a big, almost epic debut novel of family, history, the weird nearly Gothic South, sisterly rivalry and the mystery of who their, our parents are, were, might be.  In The Deeper the Water the Uglier the […]

My guest this week on Bibliocracy (Sunday, 5 PM on KPFK) has embraced the zeitgeist, smother it and shot it and otherwise committed his elegant artful violence, then resuscitated and reanimated and repurposed what’s left.  The writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is just now being justifiably heralded for his literary craft, unshy politics and humane satire, with his short story collection Friday Black chosen for every “best of” annual fiction list there is.  Adjei-Brenyah is from Spring Valley, New York, born of Ghanaian parents, graduated from SUNY Albany, received his MFA from Syracuse University with writing awards and work published in celebrated literary journals before the arrival of this debut collection.  The storytelling arrives just slightly ahead of the next illogical, absurd or impossibly sadistic episode offered our civic lives, with enviably precise and poetic premises which document, perversely if honestly, the violence of everyday racism, gun nuttery, commodifaction culture, working life in retail.  Nana Kwame Adjei-Benyah’s audacious gift to readers has both evoked the best of a singular American tradition --- Vonnegut, Pynchon, George Saunders --- and supercharged it. I read the twelve short stories in Friday Black in one sitting, and am so pleased to join the crowd making big noise over this book. Thanks for listening.

In Dear Los Angeles:  The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018, critic, book store owner, arts booster an all-around literary dude David Kipen has assembled what we’d all like, perhaps, to offer the world, especially the world of other book people: an almanac of our region, a joyful transcript of a cocktail party […]

My guest this week on Bibliocracy Radio (5 PM, Sunday on KPFK) has both taken on and one-upped the “great man theory” of history or journalism to produce a reading of our state through a great, if flawed, celebrated, always fascinating family.  In The Browns of California:  The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and […]

This week on Bibliocracy (Sunday at 5 PM)  I pay tribute to the late writer Robley Wilson.  Poet, short story writer, novelist, teacher and editor, Robley Wilson died in early August at the age of 88.  For fans of his, including myself, the sadness of his passing is easily, insistently, vigorously countered by reaching for […]

My guest this week is scholar, activist, self-described radio survivor Matthew Lasar, an authoritative and provocative voice, a historian of radio but also a fan, albeit in its many iterations.  He is the author of two previous books, their subject being my favorite non-corporate community radio network.  He has for decades offered an even larger analysis […]