KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Barry Lopez, whose latest book is “Horizon” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

From Barry Lopez’s website:

From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters–human, animal, and natural–that have shaped an extraordinary life.

Taking us nearly from pole to pole–from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth–and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as “one of our finest writers,” gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.

Special thanks to the Bay Area Book Festival and Cherilyn Parsons.

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Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City novels and other works, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded June 14, 2007 at KPFA following the publication of “Michael Tolliver Lives,” which features one of the key characters from the series.

In the interview, he discusses the origins of the series and how he came to write it, as well as the three miniseries based on the books, two on PBS and one on Showtime, all featuring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis as Mary Ann and Mrs. Madrigal, respectively. He also talks about The Night Listener, which became a film with Robin Williams along with the novel Maybe the Moon.

Two more Tales of the City novels were published after Michael Tolliver Lives. Mary Ann in Autumn in 2016 and The Days of Anna Madrigal in 2017, and a musical version of Tales was produced at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre in summer 2011 for a successful two-month run.

A new Netflix miniseries, Tales of the City, featuring actors who had appeared in earlier television adaptations, premiered in early June, 2019, and uses various elements and characters from these later works.

A documentary on Armistead’s life, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, can also be found on Netflix. His memoir, Logical Family, was published in 2017.

An interview with Armistead concerning Mary Ann in Autumn can be found on the bookwaves.com website.

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Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, co-authors of the humor book, “Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother’s Suggestions,” talk about their work and life with host Richard Wolinsky.

Roz Chast is a legendary New Yorker cartoonist with several books to her credit. Patricia Marx was the first woman working at the Harvard Lampoon, and spent a year in the writers’ room of Saturday Night Live. These days she writes Talk of the Town and other pieces, along with assignments, for the New Yorker magazine.

Together they’ve created a book based upon the words of Patricia Marx’s mother, illustrated by Roz Chast. In this interview, they talk about the book; Patricia Marx discusses her career in comedy and humor writing, and the two authors take out the ukulele’s for a couple of parody songs.

Photo on podcast page: left to right: Roz Chast, Patricia Marx. Photo: Richard Wolinsky.

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Tony Horwitz (1958 – May 27, 2019) discusses his most recent book, “Spying on the South” with host Richard Wolinsky. Recorded May 17, 2019.

The author of several books that combine scholarship, history and travel, Tony Horwitz was a one of a kind author. In “Confederates in the Attic,” he looked at Civil War re-enactors in the Deep South. In “Blue Latitudes,” he followed the path of explorer James Cook, visiting islands in the Pacific Ocean. And in “Spying on the South,” now his final book, he follows the path of the young Frederick Law Olmstead, later to design Central Park, as he went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers all the way to the Mexican border, seeing how a century and a half has changed the landscape and the people.

Ten days after this interview was conducted, Tony Horwitz died of a heart attack in Washington D.C., in the middle of his book tour.

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Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 and its sequel, Closing Time, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded in San Francisco on October 17, 1994.

Since its original publication in 1961, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller has become a classic of anti-war literature, gaining fame during the Vietnam era for its dark and satirical look at American military life. Filmed to middling results by Mike Nichols in 1970, a new miniseries on Hulu has brought the novel back into the spotlight, where its focus on circular reasoning and insanity seems a propos to life during the current American regime. Catch-22 was Joseph Heller’s first novel. In the 1970s he wrote the novels Something Happened and Good as Gold, and in the 1980s God Knows and Picture This, and the non-fiction No Laughing Matter about his struggle with Guillan-Barre Syndrome

In 1994, Joseph Heller came out with a sequel to Catch-22, titled Closing Time, which deals with what happened to Yossarian and other characters after the end of World War II. This interview was recorded during that book tour and deals with both books, as well as other aspects of his career, along with comparisons to the works of Kurt Vonnegut.

Despite respectful reviews and a good reputation, Closing Time is mostly forgotten today, though it is easily available on-line in both paper and e-book. Joseph Heller published a memoir, Now and Then, in 1998, and another novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, an autobiographical work about an author who is unable to shake the success of his very first novel, was published posthumously in 2000. The film of Catch-22 is available streaming thru Amazon Prime subscription; and the mini-series is available streaming on Hulu.

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