KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Margaret Atwood, in conversation, recorded on September 14, 2000 with hosts Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, during the book tour for “The Blind Assassin.”

In this interview, heard in its entirety for the first time, Margaret Atwood takes an in-depth look at her Man Booker winning novel, “The Blind Assassin,: along with forays into the world of pulp magazines, life in Canada during the depression, Canada’s response to the Lincoln Brigade, and a deep dive into her writing practices.

Margaret Atwood was interviewed seven times for Probabilities/Bookwaves, starting in 1989 with the last interview to date in 2013. This interview, recorded during her book tour for “The Blind Assassin,” which would win the Booker Prize in 2000 and was named Time magazine’s Book of the year, was conducted on September 14th 2000, and was the last Atwood interview to feature the show’s late co-host, Richard A. Lupoff.

Other Radio Wolinsky interviews with Margaret Atwood:

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Larry McMurtry, with Diana Ossana, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded October 13, 1994 while on tour for the collaborative novel, Pretty Boy Floyd.

Larry McMurtry, the regional novelist who became an iconic American literary figure, died of congestive heart failure at the age of 84 on March 25, 2021. The author of such classic novels as Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment and Desert Rose, he also wrote over thirty screenplays, many of them in collaboration with Diana Ossana, with whom he lived for several decades.

Rarely one to go on a book tour, Larry McMurtry, along with Diana Ossana, showed up at the KPFA studios to publicize Pretty Boy Floyd, and it was there on, October 13, 1994, that Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky had a chance to talk with both of them about their book, and with Larry McMurtry about his career.

While Pretty Boy Floyd was the first collaboration between Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, it would be far from the last. After writing the novel and working on the miniseries Streets of Laredo, which was aired in 1995, they would again collaborate on two more miniseries, Dead Man’s Walk, a prequel to Lonesome Dove, and Comanche Moon, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, along with screenplays for two films – Good Joe Bell, which hit the festival circuit in  2020, starring Mark Wahlberg, and in 2005, Brokeback Mountain, which won them both the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In the interview, they discuss the screenplay for Pretty Boy Floyd, and a screenplay for a film adaptation of the 1950s television series, Father Knows Best. Neither screenplay ever became a film.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited by Richard Wolinsky in March 2021. This is the first time the complete interview has been heard.

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Margaret Maron (1938-2021) in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff on the Probabilities radio program on KPFA, recorded June 6, 1994 while she was on tour for the third Deborah Knott mystery, Shooting at Loons.

Margaret Maron died of a stroke on February 23, 2021 at the age of 82. At the time of her death she’d written twenty Judge Deborah Knott mysteries, nine Sigrid Harald mysteries, two other novels, and two collections of short stories. Along with writing about complex women characters, her books also focused on her native North Carolina, its life and its politics.

Following the interview, her next book was in the Sigrid Harald series, Fugitive Colors, published in 1995. She stayed away from that series until 2017, when she wrote Take Out, which turned out to be her last novel. She won an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1993 and for Best Short Story in 2002 and was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America in 2013.

After Shooting at Loons, she wrote seventeen more Deborah Knott novels. Also, over the course of her career, she became a major spokeswoman and advocate for the organization Sisters in Crime, and served as its first Vice President, and later its President.  Despite the success of her novels, to date none of her books or stories have been adapted for film or television, according to IMDb.

This interview was digitized and re-edited in March, 2021 and represents the first time it has been heard in over a quarter century. This is the first time the complete interview has ever seen the light of day.

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Don DeLillo, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded on tour for the novel Cosmopolis on April 2, 2003.

One of America’s most revered novelists, Don DeLillo is the author of White Noise, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1985, was a Pulitzer finalist for Mao II and Underworld, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.

Prior to all the awards, he made his name with a series of novels in the 1970s, including End Zone and Ratner’s Star. His most recent novel, The Silence, was published in 2020.

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This podcast was first posted on February 20, 2016.

A conversation with Umberto Eco (1932-2016), author of Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and other novels.

Umberto Eco, who died on February 19, 2016 at the age of 84, was one of the world’s leading semiologists, studying the relationship of signs and symbols to meaning and language. He was also a well-known and well respected novelist. The Name of the Rose, a detective novel set in the middle ages, became a surprise best-seller, and he followed it up with Foucault’s Pendulum, which dealt with world conspiracies, and five later novels.

On June 15, 2005, Richard Wolinsky sat down with Umberto Eco in the KPFA studios while the Italian writer was on tour for his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It would be the last time Umberto Eco reached the West Coast to speak about his work.

Radio Wolinsky page photo: Erinc Salor, Wiki Creative Commons.

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