A podcast posted every Sunday featuring extended interviews and discussions from Bookwaves, Art-Waves, and Bookwaves Artwaves Hour programs on KPFA, and newly digitized and edited archive interviews from the pre-digital Probabilities series dating back to 1977. Literature, theater, film, the visual arts: in-depth interviews from a progressive and artistic viewpoint, with long-time KPFA/Pacifica host Richard Wolinsky.
Howard Browne (1908-1999) was a novelist, pulp magazine editor, radio writer, screenwriter and author of dozens of television episodes in the 1950s. He discusses his long career, with anecdotes from life in the depression, ’40s radio, and his work in Hollywood. This is the only radio interview he ever gave, hosted by Richard A. Lupoff, dating to the mid to late 1980s. The interview was digitized, remastered and re-edited by Richard Wolinsky in 2018/
Richard Powers, whose latest novel is “The Overstory,” is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky. The author of “The Time of Our Singing” and “The Echo Maker” delves into the world of eco-terrorism and the secret life of trees in this epic story about eight individuals who, together and apart, come to see the forests of earth as our salvation, and the salvation of the planet.
Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. In this interview recorded October 20, 2017, she discusses the role of Buchanan and the Mont Pelerin Society in the underpinnings of this gradual take-over of the state and federal government, and what the goals are, according to her research.
Harlan Ellison (1934-2018), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded in San Francisco on September 15, 1997, while he was on tour for his collection, “Slippage.” Impossible to categorize, and sometimes impossible to be around, Harlan Ellison was an acclaimed short story writer known for his science fiction and fantasy, a novelist, an editor known for the classic Dangerous Visions anthologies, a television writer and consultant, a media gadfly, and one of the most steadfast promoters of reading and independent bookstores.
Simon Winchester, whose latest book is “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World,” is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky. A master at non-fiction writing, Simon Winchester looks at the difference between precision and accuracy, and at how these two elements helped create the world we see today, from automobiles to cell phones.
Len Cariou, Tony Award winner for the original production of “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and star of his one-man show, “Broadway and the Bard,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.
Steven Bach (1938-2009) author of the biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl”, interviewed in 2007 by Richard Wolinsky. Leni Riefenstahl was the film maker behind the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Reifenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of a hundred and one, to the end of her life denied her work was political, that she was an artist.
Tayari Jones, whose latest novel is “An American Marriage,” is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky. “An American Marriage” deals with a marriage torn apart by the unjust arrest and imprisonment of the husband after an accusation by a white woman at a motel, and how both spouses deal with the following few years. “An American Marriage” is a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection.
Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was one of the most important writers to come out of World War II. After forging a career as a novelist, he turned to narrative non-fiction with such classics as “Armies of the Night” and “Of a Fire on the Moon.” This podcast is taken from two interviews, the first on November 6, 1995, with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff during Mailer’s tour for his biography of Pablo Picasso, and the second, a solo interview by Richard A. Lupoff, on May 19, 1998, came during Mailer’s tour for his collection “Time of our Time.”
Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, authors of “The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. The book is an oral history of the play by Tony Kushner, looking at not only its history, but how Angels in America fits into the fabric of the American saga and theatrical history. SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for the play and film.
