|
West Coast Live
''West Coast Live'' (1985—2018) was a weekly two-hour radio variety show hosted by Sedge Thomson. The unscripted program features interviews with world-renowned authors and cultural figures along with performances by musicians, comedians and other entertainers. It is broadcast live-to-satellite each Saturday morning in front of a theater audience from one of several San Francisco Bay area venues. The show was carried on NPR stations from coast-to-coast, and in Paris, France until 2018. Occasionally, the show traveled to theaters, music festivals and film festivals throughout the northwest. The ''Biospherical Digital-Optical Aquaphone'' (container of water sloshed for microphone), is the "trademarked signature" of Sedge Thomson. Past guests Writers include: Diane Ackerman, Maya Angelou, Julian Barnes, T. C. Boyle, Ray Bradbury, A. S. Byatt, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Julia Child, Billy Collins, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jonathan Sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variety Show
Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical performances, sketch comedy, magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is normally introduced by a compère (master of ceremonies) or host. The variety format made its way from the Victorian era stage in Britain and America to radio and then television. Variety shows were a staple of English language television from the late 1940s into the 1980s. While the format is still widespread in some parts of the world, such as in the United Kingdom with the '' Royal Variety Performance'', the Philippines with ''Eat Bulaga!'' and '' It's Showtime'', and South Korea with '' Running Man'', the proliferation of multichannel television and evolving viewer tastes have affected the popularity of variety shows in the United States. Despite this, their influence has still had a major effect on late night television whose late-night talk shows and NBC's vari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan (born September 7, 1962) is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel, ''A Visit from the Goon Squad,'' won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president of PEN America. Early life After graduating from Katherine Delmar Burke School and Lowell High School (San Francisco), Lowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. While an undergraduate, she dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh 128K, Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating, she spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge, supported by a Thouron Award, where she earned an M.A. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write. Career Egan has published short fiction in the ''The New Yorker, New Yorker'', ''Harper's Magazine, Harper's'', ''Zoetrope: All-Story'', and ''P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Armistead Maupin
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. ( ; born May 13, 1944) is an American writer notable for '' Tales of the City'', a series of novels set in San Francisco. Early life Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., to Diana Jane (Barton) and Armistead Jones Maupin. His great-great-grandfather, Congressman Lawrence O'Bryan Branch, was from North Carolina and was a railroad executive and a Confederate general during the American Civil War. His father, Armistead Jones Maupin, founded Maupin, Taylor & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in North Carolina. Maupin was raised in Raleigh. – in ''The Independent'' of Raleigh, North Carolina, June 1988 – autobiographical memoir Maupin attended Ravenscroft School and graduated from Needham Broughton High School in 1962. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote for ''The Daily Tar Heel.'' [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus (né Gerstley; born June 19, 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. Biography Marcus was born Greil Gerstley in San Francisco, California, the only son of Greil Gerstley and Eleanor Gerstley (née Hyman). Marcus is Jewish. His father, a naval officer, died in December 1944, when a Philippine typhoon sank the USS ''Hull'', on which he was serving as second-in-command. Admiral William Halsey had ordered the U.S. Third Fleet to sail into Typhoon Cobra "to see what they were made of," and, despite the crew's urging, Gerstley refused to disobey the order, arguing that there had never been a mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy and that "somebody had to die". The incident inspired the novel '' The Caine Mutiny''. Eleanor Gerstley was three months pregnant when her husband died. In 1948, she married Gerald M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguire (born June 9, 1954) is an American novelist. He is the author of ''Wicked (Maguire novel), Wicked'', ''Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister'', and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories. Maguire published his first novel, ''The Lightning Time'', in 1978. ''Wicked'', published in 1995, was his first novel for adults. It was adapted into a popular Wicked (musical), Broadway musical in 2003, which was later adapted into a Wicked (film franchise), two-part musical film series, with the Wicked (2024 film), first film released in 2024 and the Wicked: For Good, second film scheduled to be released in 2025. Maguire is married to American painter Andy Newman, in one of the first same-sex marriages performed in the state of Massachusetts. Biography Born and raised in Albany, New York, Gregory Maguire is the youngest of four children born to Helen and John Maguire. His mother died from compli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Lamott's writings, marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, cover such subjects as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression, and Christianity. Early life and education Lamott was born in San Francisco, and is a graduate of Drew School. She was a student at Goucher College for two years where she wrote for the newspaper. Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer. Her first published novel ''Hard Laughter'' was written for him after his diagnosis of brain cancer. She has one son, Sam, who was born in August 1989 and a grandson, Jax, born in July 2009. Career Lamott's life was documented in Freida Lee Mock's 1999 documentary ''Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott''. Because of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid (; born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she now lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence, Emerita at Harvard University. Biography Kincaid was born in St. John's on the island of Antigua, on 25 May 1949. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, a literate, cultured woman and homemaker, and her stepfather, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting when Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she resented her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled, Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotion ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Irving
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American and Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of his fourth novel '' The World According to Garp'' in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including '' The Hotel New Hampshire'' (1981), '' The Cider House Rules'' (1985), '' A Prayer for Owen Meany'' (1989), and '' A Widow for One Year'' (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 72nd Academy Awards in 2000 for his script of the film adaptation of ''The Cider House Rules''."John Irving 1999 Acceptance Speech on Winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay" , ''oscars.org'' Five of hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Hass
Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award"National Book Awards – 2007" National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-04-08. (With acceptance speech, interview, and other materials; and essay by Evie Shockley from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970) is an American author, musician, screenwriter, television writer, and television producer. He is best known for his children's book series ''A Series of Unfortunate Events'' and '' All the Wrong Questions'', published under the pen name Lemony Snicket. The former was adapted into a film in 2004, as well as a Netflix series from 2017 to 2019. Handler has published adult novels and a stage play under his real name, along with other children's books under the Snicket pseudonym. His first book, a satirical fiction piece titled '' The Basic Eight'', was rejected by many publishers for its dark subject matter. Handler has also played the accordion in several bands, and appeared on the album '' 69 Love Songs'' by indie pop band The Magnetic Fields. Life Handler was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Sandra Handler (née Walpole), a retired City College of San Francisco dean, and Louis Handler, an accountant. His father was a Jewi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Best known for his poem " Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956, and a subsequent obscenity trial in 1957 attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made male homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of Low-life, lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel ''Neuromancer'' (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s. After expanding on the story in ''Neuromancer'' with two more novels (''Count Zero'' in 1986 and ''Mona Lisa Overdrive'' in 1988), t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
