Joining me today are Kelly Justice, manager of Fountain Bookstore in Shockoe Slip and Ward Tefft, owner of Chop Suey Books in the Fan and Chop Suey Tuey in Carytown. Our conversation is a loose dialogue about everything from the death of print, the birth of cellphone fiction and the soon-to-be-extinct “Page Turning Buzz.” We also discuss several of our favorite books of the year, including “No One Belongs Here More Than You” by Miranda July, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie and “Jamestown” by Matthew Sharpe.
Happy Holidays, and thanks for tuning in all year…
Liz
Listen to the show:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
About the book: “In the spirit of Truman Capote’s classic holiday book, A Christmas Memory, award-winning writer Michael Knight delivers a poignant meditation on loss, legacy, and love, at a particularly complicated time of year. In The Holiday Season, the Posey men are still figuring out how to be a family years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As Thanksgiving nears, hairline fractures in the Poseys’ relationships finally splinter and crack over what should be, but never is, a simple question: where to spend the holidays. Patriarch Jeff wants everything to remain how it was when his wife was alive, but his oldest son thinks it’s time to move on and establish fresh traditions. Caught in the middle is younger son, Frank, a struggling actor who, as the conflict between his father and brother escalates, is finally forced to choose between them. The companion piece, Love at the End of the Year, is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year’s Eve.”
Thanks for tuning in.
Liz
Listen to the show:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
On November 5th, 2007 the Writers Guild of America officially put down their pens and picked up their picket signs. Since that day, the cinematic scribes have shut down Hollywood, put the late night talk shows into repeats, stopped a presidential debate and kept every syndicated radio show hypothesizing about its outcome for five weeks. But what is it really all about?
In the 80’s the Writer’s Guild of America accepted a token residual for the re-release of their work on home video. The digital future holds billions in potential revenue for the studio owning conglomerates but where do the writers fall in this category? The producers say that the future of downloading video is too tentative to sign any type of official agreement. The once burnt writers are crying, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
My guest this week, Richard Fine, is a Professor of English and former chair of the English Department at VCU, where he has taught since 1979. He was educated at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. He routinely teaches courses in 20th century American literature as well as courses in film and film history. He is the author of “West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood, 1928-1940″ and “James M. Cain and the American Authors Authority,” an account of the controversial attempt to organize American writers nationwide in the late 1940s.
On this show we discuss the long history of writers versus producers and why what they do is so unique and difficult. At the end of the show, Mr. Fine gives a stunning speech on the necessity of good writers and why they will always be “at a premium.”
Richard Fine is also the founding director of VCU’s innovative Glasgow Artists and Writers Workshop, a month-long program held at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland every other summer, and has been a visiting professor at two different French universities. He is currently at work on two quite varied projects, one about the doctrine of moral rights as it relates to intellectual property law in France and the United States, and the other a study of how the American press related to the military during the Second World War.
Thanks for tuning in.
Liz
Listen to the show:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
discuss several of our favorite books of the year, including “No One Belongs Here More Than You” by Miranda July, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie and “Jamestown” by Matthew Sharpe.
