KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

​​​​​Richard Powers, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky during the book tour for “The Time of Our Singing,” recorded in the KPFA studios, February 15, 2003.

Richard Powers is one of America’s most distinguished novelists. In 2006, his novel The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award and was a finmalist for the Pulitzer, and his most recent novel, The Overstory, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 2003, his novel The Time of Our Singing was published to excellent reviews. A multi-generational epic of the civil rights movement, the book combined his love of physics and music, and took his writing to a new level, becoming a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winning two other major literary awards.

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Flynn Berry, whose latest thriller is “Northern Spy,” set in contemporary Northern Ireland, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky. Recorded via zencastr on May 12, 2021.

Flynn Berry is the author of two other novels, “Under the Harrow,” which won the Edgar Award for best first novel, and “A Double Life.”

“Northern Spy” takes place in Northern Ireland as the tension between Catholics and Protestants has ratcheted up several notches. A single Catholic mother of an infant son, working as a producer in Belfast’s BBC studios, finds herself increasingly drawn into dealings with the IRA through her sister, who had lived a double life for the previous seven years.

In this interview Flynn Berry discusses how she came to write the novel, her writing process, and her history as an author of thrillers.

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Jacques d’Amboise (1934-2021), whose memoir is titled “I Was a Dancer,” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, April 6, 2011.

Jacques d’Amboise, who died on May 2, 2021 at the age of 88 following complications from a stroke, was a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet from 1953 to his retirement in 1984. As such, he was considered the living embodiment of the choreography of the great George Balanchine.

In 1976, he founded the National Dance Institute to teach dance to children. In time, he became one of the most famous dancers in America, appearing as one of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and as the male dancer in the second act ballet in Carousel in those respective 1950s films.

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Damon Knight (1922-2002), noted science fiction and fantasy editor and novelist, and master of the short story, in conversation with the hosts of Probabilities, Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, on July 3, 1983 at Westercon San Jose.

Damon Knight, who died at the age of 79 back in 2002, made his mark in the world of science fiction as a short story writer, novelist, and as an editor of several magazines and anthologies, including the Orbit series of 21 paperback anthologies, which ran for over a decade. In a career that stretched from 1940 to the mid-1990s, he wrote seventeen novels, and a long list of science fiction and fantasy short stories. His most famous story, “To Serve Man” became a classic Twilight Zone episode. For those in the field, however, he is most noted for being the founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) organization, and the co-founder of the legendary Milford and Clarion Writers Workshops.

The interview began with questions about his start as a science fiction writer, and his entry into a group of leftist science fiction writers known as the Futurians, in the early 1940s, and continued into a discussion of the founding of SFWA, his work as an editor, and his work in early television

After 1983, he would go on to write seven more novels after the interview in the nearly two decades he would go on to live. As with many revered science fiction authors of the second half of the twentieth century, without any new television or film credits, his renown has faded over time, and few, if any, of his novels or anthologies remain in print, though some are available as ebooks.

This interview was digitized, remastered and re-edited in March and April 2021 by Richard Wolinsky. As with most of the Probabilities interviews, this interview hadn’t seen the light of day since it was first aired, and has never been aired or published in its entirety until now.

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