KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Tommy Orange, author of the novel “There There,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. “There There” is set in and around Fruitvale and the Coliseum areas in Oakland, and looks at the lives of several Native Americans, young and old, as they converge for a giant pow-wow. The novel stretches back in time to the takeover of Alcatraz and forward to the present day, shattering stereotypes and delving into the real lives of the urban Native American.

Tommy Orange was born and raised in Oakland, and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma.

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Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), interviewed in 1991 by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff. March, 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Slaughterhouse Five.”

In 1991, while on tour for his collection of essays, “Fates Worse Than Death,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. stopped in the KPFA studios to speak with the hosts of the “Probabilities” program about his work, his career, and his feelings about life and politics.

This interview was originally recorded in September, 1991 and was digitized, remastered and re-edited in 2011 by Richard Wolinsky.

This was the last interview of any kind to occur in the off-air studio in KPFA’s old offices on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The new radio station on Martin Luther King Jr Way was already operational but we were able to squeeze in this last one in the old building.

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Barry Eisler, whose latest novel is “The Killer Collective,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

The author of fifteen novels in the thriller genre, plus short stories and essays, Barry Eisler is an attorney who spent three years working in the CIA before realizing he did not want a career in a government bureaucracy. Most of his novels feature a mixed race Asian/Caucasian assassin named Rain. Two other characters, a black ops specialist named Ben Treven and a Seattle detective named Livia Lone, also appear in various books. All three characters come together in “The Killer Collective,” which examines a government cover-up in the Secret Service, and outsourcing involving a mercenary army similar to Erik Prince’s company (formerly known as Blackwater).

In this interview, Barry Eisler discusses his career as a writer, secrecy in government, how he builds his novels, along with his use of technological extrapolation, which often pans out in real life.

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Brian Garfield, who died on December 29, 2018, one month shy of his eightieth birthday, wrote at least sixty-five novels, most of them westerns, three collections of short stories, three books of non-fiction and several works for film and television. Though writing mostly in the western genre, he is best known for the revenge novel Death Wish, which became a hit movie starring Charles Bronson in 1974, along with Hopscotch, which became a successful film with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in 1980. His 1982 Western Films: A Complete Guide is still the definitive work on the subject.

In 1983,Richard Wolinsky, along with Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson sat down with Brian Garfield to talk about his career. An extremely prolific writer at the time of the interview, and only in his early 40s, Brian Garfield’s output declined precipitously afterward, with only two novels and one non-fiction book published over the final 35 years of his life.

Brian Garfield’s best novel, Wild Times, is currently out of print, though a kindle edition is available for a low price. The mini-series of Wild Times and the musical Legs never came out on DVD and are unavailable for streaming, The original Death Wish and its sequels can be rented on Amazon and Hopscotch is available free on Kanopy through your public library. A remake of Death Wish came out in theaters in 2018, starring Bruce Willis, and promptly flopped. It is currently streaming on Epix.

This podcast was digitized and re-edited in 2019 by Richard Wolinsky. The podcast is dedicated to the memory of Patricia Lupoff, who was also present at the interview.

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Francine du Plessix Gray, who died on January 13, 2019 at the age of 88, was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker Magazine. Born in Poland, the daughter of a French diplomat and Russian émigré from the revolution, she was raised in Paris and came, with her mother, to the United States after the Germans took France. Her most notable book, “Them,” is the story of her parents’ lives, and Richard had a chance to speak with Francine du Plessix Gray about that book and about her career, recorded at KPFA on May 22, 2005.

Francine du Plessix Gray wrote one more book after the interview, a biography, of Madame Germain de Stall, a novelist and travel writer who lived during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. Them won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir in 2005.

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