In this segment we talk with Nina Serrano about her novel, Nicaragua Way: An International Novel of Love and Revolution in the 1980s, which tells the fascinating story of the Bay Area's involvement in the Sandinista revolution. Nina also gives her take on the current crisis in Nicaragua.
Immigrants Are Welcome Here! Stories of Struggle, Triumph and Resistance
This week on Women's Magazine, after a week of historic protests around the country protesting the government's inhumane treatment of refugees from Latin America, we hear three stories about immigration.
This segment features novelist and short story writer Yang Huang describes her own journey from Jiangsu, China to Berkeley, her life as a "blue collar writer" and what it feels like to be an immigrant in the U.S. today. Her newest book is MY OLD FAITHFUL, a collection of stories about family life in China.
"Writing has to be painful, it should not be easy...I choose writing." -Yang Huang
Then Kristin Hannah, author of the #1 bestsellers The Nightingale and The Great Alone, joins Kate Raphael to talk about creating compelling stories of women's resistance and resilience.
Kristin will be in town on Monday, March 19 for a talk at Books, Inc. Opera Plaza. (This event is ticketed.) Kristin will be in conversation with Frances Dinkelspiel, award-winning journalist, co-founder of the news site Berkeleyside, and author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California.
Find this book at your local bookstore, library or on-line
The second part of the show Kate talks with author Lily Iona McKenzie about her newest novel, Curva Peligrosa, about a larger-than-life Mexican woman who settles in a tiny Alberta town after a twenty-year trek. It's an engaging and surprising story, touching on indigenous rights and the power of community.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of the novel, A Thin Bright Line. Based on the (partially imagined) life of her aunt, Lucybelle Bledsoe, the novel weaves McCarthyism, climate change, civil rights and pre-Stonewall gay life into a rich tapestry.
The New York Times calls it "an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” A Thin Bright Line is a political and authentic historical novel of lesbian lives in the 1950's and 1960's. Lucy Jane writes about how we love.
Find the book at your local bookstore, library or on-line.
Events with Lucy Jane Bledsoe: Celebrating Indie Bookstore Day @ Books Inc
Berkeley, CA
Saturday, April 29, 2:00-3:00
A panel on dystopian fiction
1491 Shattuck Avenue
(510) 525-7777
Kepler's Books
Date in July TBA!
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650-324-4321
Monday on KPFA Women's Magazine, we listen to an interview with Sarai Walker, author of the fabulous radical feminist novel, Dietland. Walker's novel, one of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 of 2015, draws on her Ph.D. research focused on normative femininity of the body; the fat female body; consciousness-raising and the ‘personal is political’ in feminist practice and as a literary aesthetic; and critical theory, particularly Michel Foucault. Don't miss this great interview by Meghan Murphy of Feminist Current, produced by Women's International News Gathering Service.
Click here to listen to the interview with Sarai Walker. 28:44 min
"We're Fat! We're Mean! We don't eat lean quizine!"
Next Kate Raphael talks with long-time feminist fat activist Deeg Gold about fat dyke activism in the seventies, eighties and nineties, including Let It All Hang Out Day in 1989 and 1990 in San Francisco.
"It kind of isn't healthy to discriminate against people."
Listen now to the interview with Deeg Gold or Get MP3. 11:32 min
Making your summer reading list? You’re going to want to hear about this sexy new book:
GODS OF TANGO, by Carolina de Robertis, is a steamy story of music, migration, romance and identity. Leda, a young Italian bride, arrives in Buenos Aires to find out that her husband has died. In seeking herself in her new country, Leda becomes Dante, playing violin in one of the bands taking the scandalous tango from the brothels and tenements to the high-society cabarets. Carolina de Robertis is the award-winning author of The Invisible Mountain and Perla.
From de Robertis' website:
February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. Still, she is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets. Leda eventually acts on a long-held desire to master the violin, knowing that she can never play in public as a woman. She cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and becomes “Dante,” a young man who joins a troupe of tango musicians bent on conquering the salons of high society. Now, gradually, the lines between Leda and Dante begin to blur, and erotic desires that she has kept suppressed reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her musical career, but her life.
Richly evocative of place and time, its prose suffused with the rhythms of the tango, its narrative at once resonant and gripping, this is De Robertis’ most accomplished novel yet.
