Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio present “Bookworm” — recognized for interviews of authors so in depth that they often left his topics astounded at his breadth of data of their work — has died. He was 73.
Silverblatt died Saturday at residence after a protracted sickness, an in depth good friend 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 actual star of the present was the host himself, the nasal-voiced radio character 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 folks 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 folks 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 baby when he was launched to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Neighbors would see him strolling the streets of Brooklyn together with his head in a e book and would typically name his dad and mom out of concern he would possibly 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 creator.
His faculty, nevertheless, was stuffed with such well-known authors as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee, who have been all working as professors.
Silverblatt was shy and too embarrassed to talk throughout class due to his lack of ability to obviously pronounce the letter “L,” which seems 3 times in his personal title. But he thought of the authors to be his pals, even when they didn’t comprehend it but, he mentioned in the course of the Cornell discuss.
He would method them after class to talk about their work.
Regardless of his curiosity in literature, Silverblatt’s dad and mom wished him to change into a mail service, he mentioned. The summer season 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 outdated bookstores and used-books outlets. Throughout that job, he mentioned within the Cornell discuss, he bought the entire works of Charles Dickens.
Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after faculty within the mid-Seventies and labored in Hollywood in public relations and script growth.
Like many younger writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that by no means received 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 excellent raconteur and so the remainder of the world simply vanished,” Seymour informed Instances columnist Lynell George in 1997. “Afterward I simply turned and requested him: ‘Have you ever ever thought of doing radio?’”
For the subsequent 33 years, that’s precisely what he thought of.
“Michael was a genius. He may very well be mesmerizing and all the time, all the time, all the time sensible,” 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 folks 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 facet of the microphone, as a author in his personal proper, Howard mentioned. However he confronted bouts of author’s block via his 20s and gave up writing.
“Ultimately, he got here to search 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 unbelievable reminiscence for the books he learn.
Silverblatt transformed the condominium subsequent to his Fairfax condominium right into a library the place he stored hundreds of books, Howard mentioned.
“It was heaven,” he mentioned. “It was a superb library.”
“He was such a singular individual,” mentioned Jennifer Ferro, now the president of KCRW. “He had a voice you’d by no means count on can be on radio.”
Alan Felsenthal, a poet who thought of Silverblatt a mentor, referred to as Silverblatt’s voice “delicate and tender.”
Felsenthal mentioned the present was about creating an area of “infinite compassion,” the place writers may share issues they won’t share in on a regular basis dialog.
“Michael was one in every of a sort, actually singular. And his voice is just too,” Felsenthal mentioned.
Some of the necessary tenets of Silverblatt’s method was that he not solely learn the e book he was discussing on his present that day, but additionally learn the whole oeuvre of the authors he interviewed.
“A big author would are available and be shocked by Michael’s depth of imaginative and prescient of the work at hand,” Howard mentioned.
David Foster Wallace, in a single interview, mentioned he wished Silverblatt to undertake him.
Silverblatt mentioned he strove to learn an creator’s total physique of labor, however he by no means claimed to have learn all of it if he hadn’t.
“On the whole I attempt to learn the creator’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, at the least, learn the vast majority of the work. And typically it’s a superhuman problem,” he mentioned within the 1997 Instances column.
The voracious reader mentioned that the most effective books, those who introduced him happiness, weren’t those that ease our method on this unusual and tough world.
“The books I like essentially the most made it more durable for me to dwell,” he mentioned.
Silverblatt is survived by his sister, Joan Bykofsky.
