This episode contains both parts of a two-part show featuring novelist and short story writer Sameer Pandya on his newest novel, Our Beautiful Boys.  It is receiving enthusiastic reviews as well as both popular and critical attention. Pandya’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, and Sports Illustrated. Our Beautiful Boys is a simultaneously insightful sociological study and tantalizing mystery story set in an affluent community where football, family, social media, status, ethnicity, teenage jargon and identity offer clues meant to explore conflict and consider ethical behavior, easy expectations and difficult, complicated realities. With humor and empathy, and sharp insights into class and culture, Our Beautiful Boys is an unsparing if also empathetic study of aspiration, hypocrisy, and the struggles which some adults seem to pass on to their children. 

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest is Andrew Nicholls. He's written extensively for television print and stage, and produced both a memoir and a how-to comedy writing book. Now he’s out with a long poem on the making of filmmaker Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo titled As Man is to God: A Poem on the Making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. 

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

I welcome back screenwriter and short story writer Janice Shapiro, out with her full-length graphic novel Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship, a coming-of-age story about young women who discover their place in the world.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

I welcome Dr. Nolan Higdon, a longtime media/civic literacy expert and critical media scholar, as well as activist and educator.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest is the art historian Stephen F. Eisenman, collaborator with legendary artist Sue Coe on the new collection The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism, out now from O/R Books.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

This week we simultaneously mark a maddening anniversary and celebrate joyful creative resistance with a reading of her 2021 short story “False Flag” by writer, teacher, and editor Lisa Alvarez.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

For  this month’s fund drive first edition I air an edited version of a terrific podcast hosted by writer Abby Walthausen featuring me --- of all people! --- as a guest. Its topic is the writer and artist whose work I curated for an exhibition on December 3rd through December 13 at Cerritos College.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

I host novelist and memoirist Chuck Rosenthal, author of the Loop trilogy and Never Let Me Go, among many books. His latest, Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest, is what writer Michael Ventura calls a “gentle phantasm,” a short book which imagines the role of the reader right into the writing, and into the lives of the writer and characters…here, the writer/characters John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Coleridge, Lord Byron, and their pals The Romantics.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

I host editor, anthologist, book reviewer, and essayist David L. Ulin, who has written about Los Angeles and Southern California for decades, assembling the defining Joan Didion collection for the Library of America, reviewing books and assigning articles and reviews of and about our literary region, and offering  his own original short stories and acclaimed essays too.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

Today, a reading by a favorite writer, Gary Amdahl, author of Visigoth, I Am Death, The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts and, out now, The Creative Writers: A Burlesque of the Imagination on Totalitarian Themes in the Manner of Émile Cohl and Les Arts Incohérents Harry Everett Smith, and Hanna-Barbera. 

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.