Off Mike
A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
KQED Radio's Michael Krasny is one of the country's leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. He is a writer's interviewer.
But it didn't start out that way.
In Off Mike, Krasny, host of one of public radio's most popular and intellectually compelling programs, talks of his strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Bellow and Philip Roth, and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor.
In a mix of memoir and reportage, Krasny takes readers inside his world. He gives an account of the polarizing transformation of talk radio, from his early days at KGO commercial radio, through to his current role at NPR, where he manages to keep the flow of talk in his San Francisco based show animated and politically balanced.
Forum fans and lovers of literature will be riveted by the insightful and amusing vignettes and behind the scenes accounts. They will get a taste of the sharp commentary from his encounters with panels of experts, and interviews with cultural and political personalities as well as writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Long-time host of KQED's Forum, Kransy always lusted after literature, pursuing a degree in it despite the protestations of his mother, who warned it might impress girls but would never make him money. Instead of pushing out a worthy novel, however, Krasny canonizes his talk radio career in this memoir, placing stories from his juicy backlog of interviews alongside tales of a neglectful father, his Ohio State fraternity, procreating and purchasing a home. His steadily honed love of language is palpable and infectious, suited more to the book party-hopping literary junkie than the broadcast historian. Eminent newsmakers, literary greats and iconoclasts open up to him like patients on a psychiatrist's couch; the self-proclaimed "writer's interviewer" reveals that for Michael Chabon, "it's irritating to come up with technical matters like plot and character"; that an "owl-like" Joyce Carol Oates allowed him to cradle her "as she went speechless on air... over her beloved deceased literary agent"; and that T.C. Boyle believes his wild story "If the River Was Whiskey" could have been written by anybody. Though dense at times, the text's winding path toward self-definition is rewarding. Krasny posits how little he actually knows after a lifetime of reading and questioning, happily concluding that, like most everyone else, he has experienced over his life a confluence of ordinary and extraordinary, and been fortunate enough to live to write about it.
