Susanna Clarke, author of the classic fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, interviewed September 12, 2005 in the KPFA studios.

​​​​​Back in the fall of 2004, a new fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by a newcomer, Susannah Clarke, hit the stands and became an instant classic, finding its way to best-seller lists in England and the United States, and winning the Hugo Award for 2004’s best novel at the World Science Fiction convention in 2005.

This interview with Susannah Clarke was recorded while on tour for the paperback edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The interview was originally edited down to fit a half-hour KPFA slot, and no edit of the complete interview was ever made, until now.

Both Christopher Hampton and Julian Fellowes took stabs at writing a film adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but both were unable to translate the very long novel into a screenplay, and then New Line cancelled the project. It was eventually developed into a seven -part miniseries for the BBC, and aired in both the United States and Britain in 2015. It is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

After the publication of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and the awards, Susannah Clarke continued to work on the sequel, set in the same universe a few years later, but became bogged down, almost sentence by sentence, as chronic fatigue syndrome took its toll. By 2015, after visiting the set of the BBC production, she decided to go another route, and went back to another manuscript that likely pre-dated her best-seller. That novel, Piranesi, was published to mostly favorable reviews in 2020. She is now working on a third novel.

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Vernor Vinge (1944-2024), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded in the KPFA studios, May 7, 1992 while on tour for his novel, “Fire Upon the Deep,” which would be a co-winner of the Huge Award for Best Novel at the 1993 World Science Fiction Convention.

​​​​​Vernor Vinge, who died on March 20th, 2024 at the age of 79 was one of the masters of late twentieth century and early 21st century science fiction. He won five Hugo Awards, three for Best Novel and two for best novella, and is credited as the first science fiction writer to offer a fictional cyberspace, a few years before William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Over all, Vernor Vinge wrote eight novels and had five published collections of his writings. His final novel, The Children of the Sky, was published in 2011.

A prequel to Fire Upon the Deep titled A Deepness in the Sky, was published in 1999, and a sequel, The Children of the Sky, his last novel, was published in 2011. To date, none of his stories have been adapted for either television or film. Vernor Vince retired from teaching in 2000 to become a full-time writer.

In this interview, he discusses university-level mathematics, and goes into detail about what are now the early days of life on the internet, and ways in which communications are shared using minimal bytes, and discusses his early writing about cyberspace, and about singularities. There are also comments about what the future holds, a future we now are experiencing.

This interview has not aired in over thirty years, and was digitized, remastered and edited in January 2025 by Richard Wolinsky.

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Michael Crichton (1942-2008), recorded December 5, 1990, while on tour for his novel “Jurassic Park,” interviewed by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff in the KPFA studios.

In this interview, he talks about his career and about the science behind “Jurassic Park.” Michael Crichton died in 2008 at the age of 66. (Radio Wolinsky page photo: Jon Chase/Harvard University). First posted May 3, 2020.

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Mary Higgins Clark (1927-2020), who died on January 31st, 2020 at the age of 92, was the best-selling author of 51 books, most of them suspense novels featuring women in jeopardy, with four theatrical films and over thirty other books adapted for television. Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff interviewed  Mary Higgins Clark for the Probablitiles radio program on May 24, 1989 while she was on tour for her 13th novel “While My Pretty One Sleeps.” The interview was conducted in her San Francisco hotel room.

Digitized, re-mastered, and re-edited by Richard Wolinsky in April, 2020. First posted April 17, 2020.

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Ian McEwan, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, discussing his novel “Atonement” and other works, from the archive, and recorded in New York City on April 3, 2002.

 Since 1978, Ian McEwan has had seventeen novels published and there have been ten film adaptations of his works, along with an additional three original screenplays. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize six times, winning for Amsterdam in 1998.  This interview, recorded in New York while he was on a publicity tour for “Atonement,”  has not aired in over two decades.

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Walter Mosley in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded June 23, 1996 in the KPFA studios while on tour for the novel, “A Little Yellow Dog.” He also discusses his first mainstream novel, “RL’s Dream” and the film version of “Devil in a Blue Dress.”

Today, Walter Mosley is one of America’s leading authors. He is best known for his series of mystery novels featuring the characters of Easy Rawlins and Mouse.

To date, there are now twenty non-series novels by Walter Mosley, the most recent titled Touched, published in 2023, Along with three Fearless Jones novels, six Leonid McGill mysteries, three Socrates Fortlow books, three books in the Crosstown to Oblivion series, three books in the King Oliver series, plus two graphic novels, two plays, and six works of non-fiction. Always Outnumbered became a television film in 1998 starring Laurence Fishburne. Devil In A Blue Dress, is to date, the only Easy Rawlins mystery adapted for film.  In 2022, Samuel L. Jackson starred in a TV miniseries titled The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray, based on Walter Mosley’s book, and primarily written by Walter Mosley. At present, an adaptation of his novel The Man in My Basement is in post-production. The next Easy Rawlins novel, Farewell Amethystine was published in June 2024.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in December, 2024 by Richard Wolinsky. It has not been heard in 25 years. This is the second of five interviews, to date, with Walter Mosley.

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Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded January 30, 1997 while on tour for his Leaphorn/Chee novel, “The Fallen Man,” the twelfth book in the series.

Hillerman, who died in 2008 at the age of 83, wass a  master of the detective genre and an important writer in detailing life on the Navajo reservation. His several novels featuring Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee have been acclaimed for their accuracy and for their ability to combine Navajo history and thought into strong plot-driven novels.

There are four interviews with Tony Hillerman in the Probabilities and Bookwaves archive.  This third interview, was recorded on January 30th, 1997 in the KPFA studios while he was on tour for his novel, The Fallen Man, the twelfth in the Leaphorn Chee series. Iin the interview, he also discusses his 1995  stand-alone novel, Finding Moon,

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in November, 2024, and not heard for over a quarter century.

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Nelson DeMille, who died on September 17, 2024 at the age of 81, was one of the leading best-selling authors from the 1980s into the 21st Century. Among his novels are The General’s Daughter, the Gold Coast, Plum Island and Word of Honor. Three of his novels were turned into films. On June 13, 1997, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky interviewed Nelson DeMille while he was on tour for Plum Island. In the discussion, we focused on that book, as well as several others.  This is the first of two interviews with Nelson DeMille.

Nelson DeMille would return to the character of Paul Brenner from The General’s Daughter in Up Country in 2002, he would return to John Corey from Plum Island in The Lions Game in 2000, and in seven other novels. In all, there would be 27 novels, plus two written in collaboration with his son, Alex DeMille, two early novels written under a pseudonym plus several works of short fiction. Three of his books, most notably The General’s Daughter, became films.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited by Richard Wolinsky in November 2024. Echo and other faults exist on the original recording.

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Charles Yu, whose novel Interior Chinatown just won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Interior Chinatown takes place in a meta-world in which Hollywood’s Chinese stereotypes are portrayed by Asian immigrants and second-generation Asian Americans in films and TV shows. The book uses tropes from screenplays as well as prose fiction to illuminate these tropes, switching between narrative, entertainment history, and polemic in a highly original way.

Charles Yu is the author of two previous short-story collections and one novel, has worked as an attorney, and also has worked in the writers’ room of several television shows, most notably during the first season of HBO’s Westworld. Interior Chinatown is now a television miniseries streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

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Steven Bach (1938-2009) author of the biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl”, interviewed in 2007 by Richard Wolinsky. This podcast was first posted May 5, 2017.

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.

Stephen Bach, who died at the age of 70 in 2009, had been a studio executive and began writing  books with “Final Cut”, his memoir about the making of the film Heaven’s Gate. He followed that with a biography of the playwright Moss Hart, and then a biography of actress Marlene Dietrich, which as he says, led him to Leni Riefenstahl. The interview was recorded in the KPFA studios on May 7, 2007. Guardian Obituary.

In an interview perhaps more timely today than the year it was recorded, Bach compares Reifenstahl’s work to right-wing propaganda in America, and the use of the Hitler playbook.

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Richard Powers discusses his latest novel, “Playground” with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios October 31, 2024.

Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize i 2019 for “The Overstory,” and the National Book Award in 2006 for “The Echo Maker.” He is also the author of “The Time Of Our Singing,” “Orfeo,” and “Bewilderment.” He has been a Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist multiple times.

“Playground” brings together the history of Silicon Valley and the growth of A.I. with a look at deep ocean diving and the notion of floating cities in a story that circles back on itself.

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