KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Fourteen years after her death, Octavia Butler finally made the New York Times Best Seller list, trade fiction paperback, with Parable of the Sower coming in at #14. This 1998 interview was first posted on Radio Wolinsky on December 2, 2018.

Octavia Butler died at the age of 58 in 2006. At the time of her death, she’d published 16 books, with another volume of uncollected stories published posthumously. The author of several acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels, most notably Kindred and The Parable of the Sower, her popularity and reputation continues to grow.

While a collection of interviews was published in 2009, very few audio conversations exist today. Richard Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky conducted two of those conversations. The first, early in her career in 1983, was uploaded as a Radio Wolinsky podcast in May, 2017. The interview, recorded in November 1998, came on the heels of the publication of “Parable of the Talents,” a sequel to “Parable of the Sower.”   There’s little question from this interview that not only was she a great writer, but she also predicted the politics of today in a way that seems utterly uncanny. There’s a reason people are going back to her books.

The post Encore Podcast: Octavia Butler, 1998 appeared first on KPFA.

Gail Sheehy, one of America’s most distinguished journalists, known for her incisive profiles in the New Yorker and other magazines, died on August 24, 2020 of complications from pneumonia, possibly brought on by Covid-19. She was 83.

One of the founders of the New Journalism, Sheehy’s book, Passages, a kind of road map of life from our twenties to old age, is considered one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

In this interview with host Richard Wolinsky, conducted at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, California on September 24, 2014, she talks about what would be her final book, Daring: My Passages, which takes us from her days at New York Magazine through her years as a freelance journalist, focusing on the personalities of the people she’s interviewed over the years as well as on her personal life.

Gail Sheehy Wikipedia page

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Roger Kahn, who died on February 6, 2020 at the age of 92, was one of the icons in the world of baseball writing. His classic “The Boys of Summer,” about his relationship with his father and their united love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, is one of the greatest baseball books of all time. He started his career in journalism in 1948 as a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune and within four years was covering the Dodgers for that newspaper. He moved over to Newsweek in 1956 and the Saturday Evening Post in 1963 as he revved up his career writing both fiction and non-fiction books, mostly but not exclusively about baseball, and the ups and downs of his own life.

On October 13, 1993, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky sat down for an extended interview with Roger Kahn about his book, “The Era: 1947-1957, when the Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers Ruled the World. “ It turned out he was a marvelous raconteur, as well as a keen historian of racism in the sport. In fact, his final book, published in 2014, was titled “Rickey and Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball.”  (Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson).

Dick Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky would interview Roger Kahn once more, in 1998, but that interview focused not on baseball but on a biography of boxer Jack Dempsey. After this interview, Roger Kahn would go on to write six more books, including not only the history of the early days of integration, and the biography of Dempsey, but a memoir of the people he met, a book about the view from the pitching mound, and a history of the New York Yankees improbable run for the pennant in 1978.

Digitized, remastered and re-edited in 2020 by Richard Wolinsky. This interview has not aired since its original broadcast, and never in its full length.

The post Roger Kahn (1927-2020): The Boys of Summer appeared first on KPFA.

Mavis Gallant, who died in 2014 at the age of 91, was a Canadian short story writer who spent most of her life in France. During her lifetime, she had 118 stories in the New Yorker, which made her one of that magazine’s most published writers. Along the way she did write two novels, but it was because of her shorter fiction that she was very much a writers’ writer.

A very private person, she only rarely gave interviews – but she did go on a book tour for her short story collection, Across the Bridge, and it’s then, on October 6, 1993, that Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky had a chance to speak with her.

Wikipedia notes that her subject was frequently fascism, in particular about what she called “the small possibilities in people” which leaned them toward fascism. In a roundabout way, she discusses that in this interview.

New York Review Books Classics has published several volumes of her stories, most notably The Collected Stories, which features fifty two examples of her best work, and Paris Stories, curated by Michael Ondaatje. Across the Bridge is available in an e-book edition from Amazon.

Interview digitized, remastered and edited in August 2020 by Richard Wolinsky.

Transcript of a 1999 Paris Review interview with Mavis Gallant

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Robert K. Massie, a journalist and historian whose focus was on the Russian House of Romanov, and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his biography of Peter the Great, died on December 2, 2019 at the age of ninety. Along with a well-received biography of Catherine the Great, he was also known for his books about Czar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra, and the final days of the Romanov dynasty in Ekaterinaberg in Siberia.

On November 4, 1995, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky had a chance to interview Robert K. Massie while he was on tour for his book, The Romanovs: The final Chapter, which dealt with events long after the Russian Revolution, from those claiming to be Romanov descendants to the disinterment of the Royal family’s bones after the Soviet Union fell.

The royal family, minus the two missing children, were formally reburied in St. Petetr and Paul’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998. They were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. The remains of the Tsaravich Alexei and his sister Maria were discovered in Siberia in 2007 and were eventually interred alongside their family and the rest of the Romanovs.

Massie’s description of the power of the Czars in relation to the Duma, the legislature of Russia at the time of the Revolution, sounds very Trumpian.

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