Michael Silverblatt, 'genius' host of KCRW literary show 'Bookworm,' dies at 73

[ad_1] Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio present “Bookworm” — recognized for interviews of authors so in depth that they generally left his topics astounded at his breadth of information of their work — has died. He was 73.

Silverblatt died Saturday at residence after a protracted sickness, an in depth buddy confirmed.

Though Silverblatt’s 30-minute present, which ran from 1989 to 2022 and was nationally syndicated, included interviews with celebrated authors together with Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith, the true star of the present was the host himself, the nasal-voiced radio persona who greater than as soon as in life was informed he didn't have a voice for his medium.

His present represents probably the most important archives of conversations with main literary powerhouses from the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

However Silverblatt knew that he was as a lot a personality because the individuals he interviewed.

“I’m as fantastical a creature as something in Oz or in Wonderland,” he mentioned throughout a chat in entrance of the Cornell College English division in 2010. “I prefer it if individuals can say, ‘I by no means met anybody like him,’ and by that they need to imply that it wasn’t an disagreeable expertise.”

Born in 1952, the Brooklyn native realized to like studying as a toddler when he was launched to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Neighbors would see him strolling the streets of Brooklyn along with his head in a e-book and would generally name his mother and father out of worry he may get damage.

However till he left residence for the College at Buffalo, State College of New York, on the age of 16, Silverblatt has mentioned, he had by no means met an writer.

His school, nonetheless, was stuffed with such well-known authors as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee, who had been all working as professors.

Silverblatt was shy and too embarrassed to talk throughout class due to his incapability to obviously pronounce the letter “L,” which seems thrice in his personal identify. But he thought-about the authors to be his associates, even when they didn't understand it but, he mentioned through the Cornell discuss.

He would strategy them after class to discuss their work.

Regardless of his curiosity in literature, Silverblatt’s mother and father needed him to turn into a mail provider, he mentioned. The summer time after his freshman 12 months, Silverblatt labored a New York Metropolis mail route, delivering letters to the mayor’s mansion on an Higher East Facet route that took him previous quite a few previous bookstores and used-books retailers. Throughout that job, he mentioned within the Cornell discuss, he bought the whole works of Charles Dickens.

Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after school within the mid-Seventies and labored in Hollywood in public relations and script improvement.

Like many younger writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that by no means bought made.

It was in Los Angeles that Silverblatt met Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW.

Seymour had simply returned to the US from Russia and was at a cocktail party the place everybody was discussing Hollywood. There, she and Silverblatt grew to become immersed in a one-on-one dialogue of Russian poetry.

“He’s an ideal raconteur and so the remainder of the world simply vanished,” Seymour informed Occasions columnist Lynell George in 1997. “Afterward I simply turned and requested him: ‘Have you ever ever thought of doing radio?’”

For the following 33 years, that’s precisely what he thought of.

“Michael was a genius. He might be mesmerizing and all the time, all the time, all the time good,” mentioned Alan Howard, who edited “Bookworm” for 31 years.

“It’s a unprecedented archive that exists, and I don’t assume anybody else has ever created such an archive of clever, attention-grabbing individuals being requested about their work,” Howard mentioned. “Michael was very happy with the present. He devoted his life to the present.”

Silverblatt as soon as dreamed of being on the opposite aspect of the microphone, as a author in his personal proper, Howard mentioned. However he confronted bouts of author’s block by way of his 20s and gave up writing.

“Ultimately, he got here to seek out peace with the fact of that,” Howard mentioned.

As a substitute of writing, he grew to become an accumulator of an enormous quantity of different writers’ work — in his library in addition to the repository in his head. He had an unimaginable reminiscence for the books he learn.

Silverblatt transformed the condo subsequent to his Fairfax condo right into a library the place he stored hundreds of books, Howard mentioned.

“It was heaven,” he mentioned. “It was a wonderful library.”

“He was such a singular particular person,” mentioned Jennifer Ferro, now the president of KCRW. “He had a voice you'll by no means anticipate can be on radio.”

Alan Felsenthal, a poet who thought-about Silverblatt a mentor, known as Silverblatt’s voice “delicate and tender.”

Felsenthal mentioned the present was about creating an area of “infinite compassion,” the place writers might share issues they won't share in on a regular basis dialog.

“Michael was certainly one of a sort, actually singular. And his voice is simply too,” Felsenthal mentioned.

One of the crucial essential tenets of Silverblatt’s strategy was that he not solely learn the e-book he was discussing on his present that day, but in addition learn all the oeuvre of the authors he interviewed.

“A big author would are available in and be greatly surprised by Michael’s depth of imaginative and prescient of the work at hand,” Howard mentioned.

David Foster Wallace, in a single interview, mentioned he needed Silverblatt to undertake him.

Silverblatt mentioned he strove to learn an writer’s complete physique of labor, however he by no means claimed to have learn all of it if he hadn’t.

“Usually I attempt to learn the writer’s full work. ... That’s not all the time true, and I by no means say it if it isn’t true. However as a rule, I've, not less than, learn nearly all of the work. And generally it’s a superhuman problem,” he mentioned within the 1997 Occasions column.

The voracious reader mentioned that the most effective books, people who introduced him happiness, weren't those that ease our means on this unusual and tough world.

“The books I like essentially the most made it tougher for me to reside,” he mentioned.

Silverblatt is survived by his sister, Joan Bykofsky.

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