KPFA - Bookwaves/Artwaves

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

Announcements.

Bay Area Book Festival. Merlin Sheldrake and Michael Pollan on Entangled Life, Tuesday July 7, 2020, noon Pacific.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who died on June 19, 2020 in Los Angeles of colorectal cancer at the age of 55, burst onto the literary scene in 2001 with his novel, The Shadow of the Wind, first of an interrelated group of four novels titled The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, set in Barcelona, Spain, his birthplace. This interview, recorded in May, 2009, focuses on the second novel in the series, The Angel’s Game.  The next book in the series, The Prisoner of Heaven, came out in 2012, and the final book, The Labyrinth of Spirits, was published in 2018. There were also four young adult novels, three published after this interview. Complete 54-minute interview.

Rupert Everett in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, September 26, 2018 about the film he wrote, directed and starred in, The Happy Prince, about Oscar Wilde’s final years in exile.

Rupert Everett’s film career took off with lead roles in the British films “Another Country” and “Dance with a Stranger” in the mid 1980s before his career took a nosedive when he came out as gay. He resurfaced in the late 1990s as a Hollywood star in the film “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” a period that lasted a short time before roles again dried up. Shortly afterward, he began working on a screenplay about Oscar Wilde’s final years, which finally has reached the screen as “The Happy Prince. The film stars Rupert Everett, who also served as director and screenwriter. The Happy Prince is now available for STARZ subscribers as well as On Demand.

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Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

Announcements.

Pride 2020:

Other Announcements.

The Playground is presenting, in honor of Black Lives Matter, a Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project: Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids by Vincent Terrell Durham, Streaming through June 30th. Co-sponsored by 30 companies, including Berkeley Rep, Marin Theatre Company, Custom Made Theatre, Cal Shakes, Cutting Ball, etc.

Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. Recorded in January 2013.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie revolves around the matriarch of a black family of the Great Migration and her children and grandchildren, and was an Oprah Book Club selection. From the New York Times review: “Hattie Shepherd, the title character of Ayana Mathis’s piercing debut novel, is at once a tragic heroine with mythic dimensions and an entirely recognizable mother and wife trying to make ends meet. Her story, set in 20th-century Philadelphia, is one of terrible loss and grief and survival, a story of endurance in the face of disappointment, heartbreak and harrowing adversity.” This was a debut novel.

Complete 44-minute Radio Wolinsky podcast.

Mart Crowley, author of “The Boys in the Band” and its sequel, “The Men from the Boys,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky on October 31, 2002.

Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which deals with the lives of gay men in the 1960s burst upon the off-Broadway scene in 1968 and ran for a thousand performances, becoming a film directed by William Friedkin two years later. In 2002, he wrote a sequel titled The Men from the Boys, which took place 35 years later, after Stonewall and after the AIDS epidemic. It premiered at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre on November 9, 2002. This past year, Broadway saw a revival of The Boys in the Band, featuring Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannels and Jim Parsons. Several members of that cast, including Mario Cantone and Denis O’Hare return to their roles for a live stream of The Men From the Boys, directed by Zachary Quinto, streams through June 29, 2020 on playbill.com/prideplays

Mart Crowley died of a heart attack on March 7, 2020 at the age of 84. Complete 62-minute Bay Area Theater podcast.

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Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

Announcements.

The Playground is presenting, in honor of Black Lives Matter, a Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project: Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids by Vincent Terrell Durham, June 19th at 7 pm. Via Zoom On Demand. Co-sponsored by 30 companies, including Berkeley Rep, Marin Theatre Company, Custom Made Theatre, Cal Shakes, Cutting Ball, etc.

Bookwaves:

Judy Juanita, author of the novel “Virgin Soul,” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded spring, 2013.

Judy Juanita is a poet, novelist and playwright. In her younger days, as Judy Hart, while at San Francisco State, she served as editor in chief of The Black Panther newspaper, and lived in one of the Black Panther safe houses in 1967. Along the way she came to know such figures as Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.

In 2013, her first novel, Virgin Soul, was published. It’s a fictionalized memoir of her life in the black student movement and with the Panthers. This interview, recorded recorded in the spring of 2013, goes into detail about her life during the Panther days, about the relationship of the book to actual history, and about Judy Juanita’s life after the Panthers.

Since 2013, Judy Juanita has continued to write and teach Her collection of essays, DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland was published in 2016, and she recently had a story published in the collection Oakland Noir. Judy Juanita recently completed a second novel. Extended podcast.

Bookwaves:

Bonnie Tsui discusses her book, Why We Swim, which examines the human need for moving in water, from the history of swim strokes, to how physiology plays a role in swimming, to the history of swimming from ancient times in the Sahara to Rome and to the present, and how swimming became a sport.

Bonnie Tsui lives in the Bay Area and swims regularly at the Albany Pool, when it’s open, and also swims in San Francisco Bay. She is also the author of American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods.

In the interview she discusses some of the topics in her book, and how the pandemic has affected Asian Americans. Recorded using internal Mac microphones on the zencastr website. Extended 34-minute podcast.

Bonnie Tsui portrait photo: copyright Lindsay Skiba. By permission of the publisher.

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Announcements.

Bay Area Book Festival. A conversation between poets Jericho Brown and Nikky Finney, The Witness We Bear, in conversation with Ismael Muhammed, recorded Friday, June 5, 2020, streaming on the Bay Area Book Festival You Tube channel.

This program features two recent interviews that resonate with the week’s protests and with the push toward fascism in Washington.

Bookwaves

Tayari Jones, whose latest novel is “An American Marriage,” is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and her latest, An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, February 2018). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo.  A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship.

“An American Marriage” deals with a African American spouses torn apart by the unjust arrest and imprisonment of the husband after an accusation by a white woman at a motel, and how both husband and wife deal with the following few years.

Tayari Jones website. Extended Radio Wolinsky podcast.

Art-Waves

Frank Galati, director of “Rhinoceros” by Eugene Ionesco, which ran last June at ACT’s Geary Theatre in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Frank Galati is a long-time member of the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and has taught at Northwestern University. The winner of Tony Awards for the adaptation and direction of The Grapes of Wrath in 1990, was nominated for an Oscar for co-adapting The Accidental Tourist for the screen, and was the director of Ragtime and The Pirate Queen on Broadway Frank Galati is also known for adapting several other works for stage and screen.

“Rhinoceros” is considered to be one of the greatest works of political theatre of the absurd. Originally produced in the late 1950s, the play hearkens back to the origins of fascism and how propaganda infects the minds of citizens.

Extended 41-minute Bay Area Theatre podcast.

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Announcements.

42nd Street Moon discussion about the musical The Scottsboro Boys originally scheduled for Tuesday June 2nd will now air next Tuesday, June 9th at 8 pm on Facebook live and on the 42nd Street Moon website.

Today’s program is in solidarity with those protesting every day America’s institutionalized racism and the racism and militarization of police departments around the country, and with the Black Lives Matter movement and for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other African Americans killed by police violence, and in solidarity with anti-fascism the world over.

Bookwaves

Erik Larson discusses In The Garden of Beasts, recorded in 2011. While history never repeats itself exactly, some elements remain the same. After an election in which a plurality, not a majority, of votes went to the Nazi Party in 1933, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor, and over the course of the next few years, used a combination of propaganda and state-sanctioned violence to become dictator. What we’re seeing in the United States are similar moves by Donald Trump and his enablers. Erik Larson is the author of several other works of narrative non-fiction, including his latest, The Splendid and the Vile, about Winston Churchill, Great Britain and World War Ii in 1940. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky.    Complete 44-minute interview.

Artwaves

Tarell Alvin McCraney, playwright, actor and screenwriter, recorded in 2014 as he had two plays produced in the Bay Area, Head of Passes at Berkeley Rep, and Choir Boy at Marin Theatre Company. Both plays eventually made it to New York to excellent reviews. Since the interview, he won the Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of the film Moonlight, based on one of his plays, and wrote the screenplay for the Netflix film High Flying Bird. Tarell Alvin McCraney is also the author of the acclaimed Brother Sister Plays Trilogy, and most recently, created the TV series David Makes Man, which aired on the OWN network and can be seen now on DirectTV.

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