Michael Silverblatt | |
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Born | |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Broadcaster, radio personality |
Michael Silverblatt (born August 6, 1952) is a literary critic and American broadcaster who hosted Bookworm , a nationally syndicated radio program focusing on books and literature, from 1989 to 2022. [1] He recorded over 1,600 interviews with authors and other literary figures, including Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, William H. Gass, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery.
Bookworm was broadcast by Los Angeles public radio station KCRW.
A lifelong voracious reader, Silverblatt was born in Queens, New York, into a Jewish family, attended SUNY Buffalo, majored in English, then entered postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out. [2]
Later, he moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a screenwriter. But after impressing KCRW's general manager during a discussion of Russian poetry at a dinner party, he was offered his own radio show. [3]
On Bookworm, Silverblatt interviewed a variety of writers, including W. G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace, William Gass, Zadie Smith, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Joshua Cohen, Maggie Nelson, and Richard Powers. He called his interviews "conversations" and did not use prompts or question sheets. Critics and interviewees noted Silverblatt's preparedness; he always read his interviewee's work in advance.[ citation needed ]
Underwritten by the Lannan Foundation, Bookworm was distributed free of charge to around 50 U.S. radio stations. [4] Silverblatt worked on the show unpaid for its first five years. [5]
Silverblatt coined the term transgressive fiction. [6]
Silverblatt's Los Angeles Times review of William Gass's The Tunnel was blurbed on the cover of its paperback release: "The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime." [7]
Silverblatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of Kenward Elmslie's The Orchid Stories. [8]
In 2018, Silverblatt was the inaugural recipient of the Deborah Pease Prize, awarded by A Public Space magazine for being a "figure who has advanced the art of literature". [9]
In 2023, The Song Cave published Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt, [10] a selection of notable interviews by Silverblatt.
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). The name Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
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Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. Categorized as an encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest is featured in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
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Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes very short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
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Christopher Sorrentino is an American novelist and short story writer of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according to the format of a multitrack recording session, with corresponding section titles.
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My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays by Steven Moore is a collection of book reviews that were originally published in periodicals from the late 1970s onward.
Bookworm is an interview radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt and produced by KCRW. The show featured interviews and discussions with authors and other literary figures. The show ran from 1989 to 2022, syndicated nationally on NPR.