KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Anne McCaffrey, in conversation with Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky, from the Probabilities Archive, recorded June 29, 1992. Her most recent novels at the time were The Rowan and Damia.

From Wikipedia:

Anne Inez McCaffrey (1 April 1926 – 21 November 2011) was an American-Irish writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (Best Novella, “Weyr Search”, 1968) and the first to win a Nebula Award (Best Novella, “Dragonrider”, 1969). Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2005 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named McCaffrey its 22nd Grand Master, an annual award to living writers of fantasy and science fiction. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on 17 June 2006. She also received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for her work in 2007.

New York Times Obituary

cover image from 1991.

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David Grann,  in conversation with Richard Wolinsky about “The Lost City of Z,” recorded in the KPFA studios in 2009.

David Grann has become one of America’s leading writers of non-fiction. Having written pieces for The New Yorker and New Republic as a staff writer, his first book was titled The Lost City of Z, which was adapted into a film in 2017 and now streams on Amazon Prime. Since that time, he has published three books, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, Flowers of the Killer Moon – which will become a film when shooting starts next year, directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Leonardo di Caprio and Robert DeNiro, and most recently, The White Darkness, about the British explorer Henry Worsley.

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Walter Tevis, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson, recorded for the Probabilities KPFA radio program.

Walter Tevis, who died in 1984 at the age of 56, only wrote six novels. The first was The Hustler, which was adapted into a classic film with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. The second, The Man Who Fell to Earth, was adapted into another classic movie starring David Bowie. Later came two science fiction novels, Mockingbird in 1980 and Steps of the Sun in 1983. Also in 1983 was The Queens Gambit, which is now a Netflix miniseries, and his final novel, The Color of Money, a sequel to the Hustler with a different plot than the Scorcese film, came out the year of his death 1984. This interview was recorded in the stairwell of Codys Bookstore in Berkeley in October 1981 on the publication of his only short story collection, Far From Home.

Transcript of the interview, from Brick magazine.

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Richard A. Lupoff, Dick Lupoff, former co-host of “Probabilities” and “Cover to Cover” died on October 22, 2020 at the age of 85. This podcast is dedicated to his memory and features a live radio program recorded in July, 1992 in which he, Richard Wolinsky and mystery author Shelley Singer review various books they’d read in the previous month.

Richard A. Lupoff began his career as a writer creating a science fiction fanzine, Xero, which won a Hugo Award in 1963. He began his official writing career with a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a first novel, One Million Centuries, in the early 1960s. Over the course of a very long writing career, eventually, over sixty books carried his byline, many of them science fiction novels, short story collections, and mystery novels. He also edited a still unsurpassed history of early comic books, All in Color for a Dime. Other novels include Space War Blues, Into the Aether, Sword of the Demon and The Comic Book Killer. His short story, 12:01, became a Showtime short film and was later expanded into a full-length television movie (and was most likely the inspiration for the classic film, Groundhog Day).

Starting in 1977 on KPFA, he helped create a large body of work that included most of the best-known science fiction and mystery writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and his work digging up interviews with old pulp writers and editors remains, to a large extent, the only body of work of its kind.

Probabilities began with a one-off one-hour program called Probabilities Unlimited,  with Lawrence Davidson in the first show hosting Richard Lupoff and Michael Kurland, with Richard Wolinsky at the controls. After several months, and after Richard Wolinsky became co-host, it became a regular weekly, half-hour program called simply Probabilities, which aired until 1995. Richard A. Lupoff joined the show as co-host in 1979.  Lawrence Davidson left in the mid-1980s. In 1995, the show relaunched as part of the Cover to Cover series of strip programs. By that time, it was known informally as the Richard and Richard Show. Richard Lupoff departed in 2001 to focus on his writing career. Among the notable authors interviewed by the two Richards were such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Gore Vidal, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut.

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Tea Obreht, author of the magic realist western “Inland,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

The author of “The Tiger’s Wife” turns her attention to the American west in a tale that encompasses ghosts and camels, and the hardscrabble life of frontier families.

Recorded at Book Passage Bookstore in Corte Madera, California.

Encore podcast previously posted on November 30, 2019.

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