Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:
:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments xxx @toc2:Introduction 1 @toc2:1 A Lust for Lit 000 @toc3:Joyce Carol Oates 000 Russell Banks 000 E. L. Doctorow 000 Gay Talese 000 @toc2:2 The Noble Path 000 @toc3:David Mamet 000 Paul Auster 000 T. C. Boyle 000 Joan Didion 000 @toc2:3 Marrying Up 000 @toc3:Michael Chabon 000 Jonathan Safran Foer 000 Ian McEwan 000 David Lodge 000 @toc2:4 Slouching Towards Tenure 000 @toc3:Alice Walker 000 August Wilson 000 Maya Angelou 000 Edward P. Jones 000 @toc2:5 Expanding Identity 000 @toc3:Studs Terkel 000 Don DeLillo 000 Margaret Atwood 000 Grace Paley 000 @toc2:6 The Big Show @toc3:Tom Stoppard 000 Edward Albee 000 Tony Kushner 000 Wole Soyenka 000 @toc2:7 Into the Hall of Fame and Off the Team 000 @toc3:Louise Erdrich 000 Cynthia Ozick 000 Isabel Allende 000 Jane Smiley 000 @toc2:8 A Smiling Public Man 000 @toc3:Kazuo Ishiguro 000 Francis Ford Coppola Philip Roth 000 Colson Whitehead 000 @toc2:9 Attacks from the Air 000 @toc3:Amy Tan 000 Maxine Hong Kingston 000 Ha Jin 000 Edna O'Brien 000 @toc2:10 Cleveland Redux 000 @toc3: Art Spiegelman 000 Larry David 000 Harvey Pekar 000 A. M. Homes 000 @toc2:11 Meetings with Remarkables 000 Barbara Kingsolver 000 Reynolds Price 000 Khaled Hosseini 000 Frances Mayes 000 @toc2:12 Coming In for a Landing @toc3: Umberto Eco 000 V. S. Naipaul 000 Amos Oz 000 @toc2:Epilogue 000

About the Author :
Michael Krasny is the host and senior editor of Northern California's NPR affiliate KQED's award-winning Forum program, a news and public affairs radio program that also concentrates on current events, culture, health, business and technology, the arts and entertainment. Dr. Krasny is Professor of English at San Francisco State University.

Review :
"Off Mike is an insightful homage not only to his craft, at which he has few peers, but also to the impressive litany of writers and personalities who have appeared on his show. He is as thoughtful and gracious on the page as he is behind the mike." - Khaled Hosseini, best-selling author of The Kite Runner "Krasny agonizes over not having achieved the great dream of his youth - to become 'a respected and valued author.' Now, arguably, he has achieved with nonfiction what he failed to do as a novelist: Off Mike is reminiscent of the enormously entertaining fiction of Herman Wouk and Neil Simon. Even if Krasny is not a bird, his writing soars." - San Francisco Chronicle "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 psychiatrists couch... " - Publishers Weekly "Perhaps the biggest plaudit to give Krasny - who aspired his whole life to be a novelist, but settled for hosting talk radio and television shows, doing live interviews and teaching college - is that this book is well written, and will equally please literati and listeners of commercial radio." - San Jose Mercury News "Krasny's true literary accomplishment is befriending America's intellectual elite in a public forum, giving the lay audience aural Cliffs Notes of modern classics without condescending to them. In that sense, Krasny is to literature through Off Mike what Al Gore is to global warming in An Inconvenient Truth: a trusted communicator of profundities, whose one excusable mistake is that he tells us more than we wanted to know about himself in the process." - SF Weekly