A podcast featuring extended interviews and discussions from the Bookwaves and Arts-Waves programs on KPFA, interviews and discussions with KPFA producers and hosts, and extended archive interviews from the Probabilities series over the past thirty years. Literature, theater, film, the visual arts: in-depth interviews from a progressive and artistic viewpoint, with long-time KPFA/Pacifica host Richard Wolinsky. New podcasts are generally weekly, though not always.
In 1998, Paul Theroux wrote a scathing memoir about his friendship with Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who died on August 11, 2018 at the age of 85. In this interview recorded in October, 1998, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky speak with Paul Theroux about Naipaul, and about his work. The photo shown here was taken in 2011 at their reconciliation after their fifteen year old feud.
Glen David Gold, whose latest book is “I Will Be Complete: A Memoir,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. Glen David Gold is the author of the bestselling novels Sunnyside and Carter Beats The Devil which has been translated into 14 languages. “I Will Be Complete” focuses on his early life in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, and reads like a novel.
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.
