This week, my guest is Sands Hall.  Part memoir, part intellectual autobiography, and careful take-apart of the Scientology cult, its title, Flunk. Start. Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology by Sands Hall helpfully outlines its author’s promise to the reader, an insight into the weird ideology, economic model, and, if you will, theological premise of […]

My guest this week (Sunday, 5 PM) is a celebrated poet whose artful engagement in wordplay calls attention to the sincere and subversive undermining, demanding and, yes, esteeming of words, often meant to challenge and empower readers.  Evie Shockley engages every kind of possibility of idiom, pun, syntax, irony and revisionist language history to understand […]

This week on Bibliocracy, Sunday at 5 PM:  Victoria Patterson.  After an acclaimed short story collection and three celebrated novels, a Southern California writer with a national reputation, Patterson arrives with a new short fiction collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow.  A lot is asked of the characters in the sixteen stories included here.  In her engagement […]

This week on Bibliocracy Radio I share my short conversations recorded on-site with editors and publishers of some favorite publishing outfits, big and small, hosting booths at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the USC campus:  Red Hen Press, Unnamed Press, Angel City Press, Akashic Books, and Not A Cult.  I ask […]

My guest this week on Bibliocracy has produced a memoir as startlingly clear in its details and consciously reconstructed episodes as it is ambitious in its larger mission of communicating self-awareness and consciousness.  The novelist and short story, comics, and nonfiction writer Glen David Gold is out with a literary autobiography — a sort of […]

My guest this week is a young poet whose debut collection assembles themes which he has written on, lived, interpreted through personal engagement with both art and experience, as if both a guide and player himself in our recent politics and how they have been assembled and, yes, dissembled.  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, […]

My guest this week has written an accessible if gorgeously thoughtful small book of big ideas, a philosophical consideration in parallel biographies.  This is the kind of inspired revisionist critical and fun book which your host thrills to, where missing pieces of a larger puzzle are added, in order to introduce an argument or bring […]

This week on Bibliocracy, I host two smart, mad, funny fabulists whose sociologically wry yet empathetic writing makes me happy.  Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth are literary collaborators, working together to write short fiction, sometimes called “flash fiction,” which embraces, subverts, celebrates American idiom in ways reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme,  Mark Leyner, the […]

My guest on Bibliocracy this week has produced an engaging revisionist history, a polemic, a celebration.  She’s told the life stories, often of connected lives, of women whose reputations are often built on a kind of ambiguous, confused or intentionally constructed misunderstanding, whose brilliance, strengths, missteps, ambivalence, political positions or affections are often used against […]

Sunday at 5 PM on KPFK (90.7 FM), my guest is Brenda Hillman.  Following a quartet of books each dealing with the elements, acclaimed poet Hillman finds, in her way, perhaps a new element, something experiential and typically experimental in an artful meditation and poignant celebration of what she calls “hidden life.”  Responding most immediately […]