KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Charles Yu, whose novel Interior Chinatown just won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Interior Chinatown takes place in a meta-world in which Hollywood’s Chinese stereotypes are portrayed by Asian immigrants and second-generation Asian Americans in films and TV shows. The book uses tropes from screenplays as well as prose fiction to illuminate these tropes, switching between narrative, entertainment history, and polemic in a highly original way.

Charles Yu is the author of two previous short-story collections and one novel, has worked as an attorney, and also has worked in the writers’ room of several television shows, most notably during the first season of HBO’s Westworld. Interior Chinatown is now a television miniseries streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

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Steven Bach (1938-2009) author of the biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl”, interviewed in 2007 by Richard Wolinsky. This podcast was first posted May 5, 2017.

Leni Riefenstahl was the film maker behind the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Reifenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of a hundred and one, to the end of her life denied her work was political, that she was an artist.

Stephen Bach, who died at the age of 70 in 2009, had been a studio executive and began writing  books with “Final Cut”, his memoir about the making of the film Heaven’s Gate. He followed that with a biography of the playwright Moss Hart, and then a biography of actress Marlene Dietrich, which as he says, led him to Leni Riefenstahl. The interview was recorded in the KPFA studios on May 7, 2007. Guardian Obituary.

In an interview perhaps more timely today than the year it was recorded, Bach compares Reifenstahl’s work to right-wing propaganda in America, and the use of the Hitler playbook.

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Richard Powers discusses his latest novel, “Playground” with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios October 31, 2024.

Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize i 2019 for “The Overstory,” and the National Book Award in 2006 for “The Echo Maker.” He is also the author of “The Time Of Our Singing,” “Orfeo,” and “Bewilderment.” He has been a Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist multiple times.

“Playground” brings together the history of Silicon Valley and the growth of A.I. with a look at deep ocean diving and the notion of floating cities in a story that circles back on itself.

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Anne Hillerman discusses her latest novel, “Lost Birds,” and her career as a writer with host Richard Wolinsky.

Anne Hillerman has written nine books in a series of mysteries featuring the native detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, created by her father, the legendary novelist, the late Tony Hillerman (1925-2008).

Previously a writer of travel books focusing on Santa Fe and environs, she began working on these novels following the death of her father and chose to increase the role of a minor character, Bernadette Manuelito, from Tony Hillerman’s books to one of primary protagonist. That change was later emulated in the “Dark Winds” television series.

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Francine du Plessix Gray, who died on January 13, 2019 at the age of 88, was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker Magazine. Born in Poland, the daughter of a French diplomat and Russian émigré from the revolution, she was raised in Paris and came, with her mother, to the United States after the Germans took France. Her most notable book, “Them,” is the story of her parents’ lives, and Richard Wolinsky had a chance to speak with Francine du Plessix Gray about that book and about her career, recorded at KPFA on May 22, 2005.

Francine du Plessix Gray wrote one more book after the interview, a biography, of Madame Germain de Stall, a novelist and travel writer who lived during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. Them won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir in 2005.

This interview was first posted on February 9, 2019.

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​​​​​Caleb Carr (1955-2024), author of The Alienist and other works, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios October 15, 1997. Digitized, remastered and edited in September 2024, this interview has not been heard in over a quarter century.

Caleb Carr, who died on May 23, 2024 at the age of 68, was a military historian, a novelist, and a writer who examined the nature of violence in his fiction and non-fiction. He was perhaps best known for his best-selling novel The Alienist, which recently became a two-season streaming series. Over all, he wrote 11 books, several articles and reviews, worked on both seasons of the television series and two exorcist films. He was the son of Lucien Carr, a key member of the group that included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Lucien Carr went to prison for manslaughter for killing the sexual predator who had abused him as a youth. Kerouac helped him dispose of the knife.

This interview was recorded in the KPFA studios on October 15, 1997 while Caleb Carr was on tour for The Angel of Darkness, the sequel to The Alienist. The interview includes mention of a movie-length pilot for a science fiction series, directed by Joe Dante. That pilot, originally titled The Warlord, Battle for the Galaxy, was released on DVD as The Osiris Chronicles. It is not available for streaming. While he never came back directly to the character of Lasso Kreisler, the protagonist of The Alienist, Caleb Carr’s final novel, a contemporary mystery, Surrender, New York, featured as its protagonist an expert on the life and work of Kreisler. His next book following The Angel of Darkness was Killing Time, a dystopian science fiction novel.

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John Lanchester, whose most recent novel to date is “The Wall,” is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky, recorded at KPFA on March 18, 2019. The interview was first posted on May 7, 2019.

The Wall takes place in a very possible future in which the world’s beaches have disappeared as the planet has warmed and oceans have grown. Taking place in an unnamed country, which is clearly England, a wall has been built not only to protect the land from the rising seas, but to keep out refugees fleeing no longer habitable countries. The protagonist is a young man who must guard the wall, and if it’s breached, he is forced out of the country.

John Lanchester is a novelist and essayist who has written for The London Review of Books, the Guardian and other publications. His latest book is Reality and Other Stories, published in 2020.

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Sue Grafton died on December 28, 2017 at the age of seventy-seven. Best known as the author of a series of mysteries featuring the detective Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton was at the forefront of the Sisters in Crime movement — women authors who wrote crime fiction – starting with her first mystery, A is for Alibi in 1982, and continuing the alphabet through Y is for Yesterday. The final book in the series, Z is for Zero, was never written.

On April 17, 1989, on a book tour for F is for Fugitive, and again on April 13, 1992, for I Is for Innocent, Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff  spoke with Sue Grafton about the history of her career and her writing process. This program is taken from those two interviews. Originally posted on January 9, 2018.

Complete 1989 interview

Complete 1992 interview

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Noel Casler, blogger and You Tube influencer, developed a large following based on his violation of an NDA, revealing information about Donald Trump gleaned from his six years working on the Celebrity Apprentice program. In this interview recorded by computer on December 4, 2020 and posted on December 6, 2020, he talks about his work and his perceptions of Donald Trump and MAGA.

Noel Casler spent two decades working behind the scenes at live events as a celebrity handler, with such stars as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and many others. But it was in 2015, having experienced Donald Trump on multiple occasions, that he decided to forgo his career and speak on the record about what he knew, first with the Clinton campaign (which chose not to follow up because of hubris and overconfidence) and later on Twitter, where he has amassed close to 300,000 followers.

In this hour-long interview, he discusses his background, the difference between the fictional businessman created for the two Apprentice TV shows, and the real Donald Trump, and goes into some depth about Ivanka Trump, who was his primary charge during the last three years of Apprentice live finales. He also discusses the role producer Mark Burnett played in the Trump make-over, as well as the role of Jeff Zucker in that endeavor, in charge at NBC at the time (and later at CNN).

Noel Casler Twitter Feed

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Francine Prose, author of “1974, A Personal History” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

The author of twenty novels and ten books of non fiction, Francine Prose is best known for such novels as “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, 1932,” “The Vixen,” “Household Saints” and “Mister Monkey,” and non-fiction such as “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, The Afterlife,” Francine Prose has also written two short story collections , and a picture book. Two of her novels have become films, and one, “The Glorious Ones,” became a Broadway musical.

In this book, she recalls her time hanging out with Anthony Russo, who along with Daniel Ellsberg, was responsible for The Pentagon Papers, in San Francisco in 1974 and then a few months later, in New York, capturing the vibe of what it was like to live in that time and place, and differences between then and now.

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