Don Photo Gallery
HERE
Don’s Houses
Where I’ve lived
HERE
Our Facebook Page
edited and with an introduction by
S.T. Joshi
Amazon
Hippocampus Press
...[Don Swaim's] writing is elegiac at points, sardonic at others, and -- for fans of his supernatural fiction -- often gripping with terror. -- Oldstyle Tales Press
Sandra Carey Cody Interviews Don Swaim about The Assassination on Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story on her blog: Birth of a Novel
The Society of Illustrators in New York has honored artist Jared Boggess for his striking Ambrose Bierce cover.
BIERCE MYSTERY REVIEWED
Read Chris Opfer's article on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in the online magazine How Stuff Works. Don Swaim was interviewed: HERE.
Five Questions About Ambrose Bierce
Don Swaim is questioned by Boston literary magazine
DaRK PaRTY ReVIEW. HERE
DECOPUNK FROM MONTAG PRESS "A Depression era superhero radio serial."
"Don Swaim writes with such bravura assurance and rollicking good humor that the readers are carried along from beginning to end with little chance--or desire--to catch their breaths." -- S.T. Joshi, leading scholar of weird fiction
Interview with Don about Man With Two Faces in the Bucks County (PA) Herald.
Read here
"Decopunk and Self-Reflection," Don's essay on how Man With Two Faces sprang from its literary cocoon can be read on Sandra Carey Cody's blog:
Birth of a Novel
FROM ERRATA PRESS
 Satirical echoes of Lovecraft, Bierce, and Poe permeate this alt-universe hallucinatory world of 1964 in which JFK survives, Cuba occupies the Gulf Coast, the East and West coasts of America have been destroyed, and Wichita, Kansas, is now capital of the US: AMAZON.COM .
"Amazing imagery ... It is, in short, a hoot."
"A brilliant satire. Unusually perceptive."
"Outrageous sendup. A freakin' literary romp."
 Don Swaim's H.L. Mencken Murder Case, originally published by St. Martin's Press, returns to print at amazon.com.
"...there's a dusty-attic charm to Mr. Swaim's fond evocation of bookshops past, and he couldn't have enticed a livelier ghost than Mencken to haunt them."
--New York Times Sunday Book Review
FOR FANS (& ENEMIES) OF STEAMPUNK
 Every Steampunk weapon, mode of transportation, piece of clothing, and cliché is utilized in Don Swaim's hilarious send-up of the genre. CLICK to buy.
LITERATURE FOR A
TROUBLED TIME Covid-19: The Pandemic Project, eighteen stories by Don Swaim and members of the Bucks County Writers Workshop about the pandemic: humor, narratives, fiction, essays, poetry, satire, photography. Buy HERE.
THE YELLOW BOOKE Vol 6
 This annual collection of original weird stories published by Oldstyle Tales Press includes Don Swaim's Poe-influenced short story, "Dank Tarn of Auber," about a kid who grows up to become the first zombie mayor of Wichita, Kansas: Amazon.com.
THE YELLOW BOOKE Vol 1
 Oldstyle Tales Press's first anthology of original weird tales: The Yellow Booke includes Don Swaim's short story, "The Barrier," about a posse of nits crossing the no man's land between two human eyebrows to rescue a kidnapped female nit. At Amazon.com.
edited by C. G. BauerDon Swaim's ghost story "Levin" is in this second volume of Bauer's ebook anthology series Crappy Shorts, which ain't crappy at all. HERE
DEFINITIVE INTERVIEW
Don Swaim's exhaustive interview with S.T. Joshi, the world's leading authority on Lovecraft, Bierce, sci-fi, horror, and weird fiction in general. READ
AMBROSE BIERCE ALLEY
Bierce's San Francisco. Photo-essay by Don Swaim
HERE
archy, mehitabel & james whitcomb riley
meditation by don swaim: read
Pastel of Don Swaim
by Lawrence D. Rottersman, ca. 1988
FIRST PRINTED BOOK IN THE AMERICAS
Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, artist Rare woodcut found at a flea market in New Jersey led to this illustrated essay by Don Swaim. READ
WINNERS, PEARL S. BUCK INTERNATIONAL FICTION AWARD
Don Swaim won first prize for his short story, "Dearest Friend, Annie," which focuses on the relationship between Walt Whitman and Anne Gilchrist.
Pearl S. Buck International
Don Swaim
An imagining by K.A. Silva
click to enlarge
| the AMBROSE
BIERCE site |
WCBS Newsradio 88
Appreciation Site
The Swaim in History
The Swaim in America
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PUBLISHED BY MONTAG PRESS
Available from Amazon HERE ...a triumph on every level. Don Swaim leads us through some of the most vivid events of the 1920s--from Al Capone's stranglehold on Chicago to murders in Hollywood to the stock market crash--in a narrative that is as vibrant and rollicking as the decade he is portraying. And throughout, we are regaled by H. L. Mencken's nose-thumbing of politics, religion, and American culture in general. If you can only read one novel about the Roaring Twenties, this should be it. --S. T. Joshi, leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L. Mencken, and winner of the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, British Fantasy awards
Read Don's profile in
HERE
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DON'S TAKE ON
THE ROARING 20s. HERE
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On Ali Velshi's Banned Book Club, MSNBC, Oct.19, 2024
The full Velshi report with writers Judy Blume and Jason Reynolds
: watch HERE
It was a big day when NORMAN MAILER and his entourage trooped in to be interviewed for my daily Book Beat feature. Photo in Publisher's Weekly, Oct. 25, 1991.
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Don Swaim Profile at Ohio University Library
HERE
OHIO UNIVERSITY COMPLETES
DIGITIZING BOOK BEAT
From Neil Romanosky,
Dean of University Libraries:
I am thrilled to share the news that we have completed the digitization of the Don Swaim Collection.
Phase one of the project was completed in January 2018, when the newly digitized Book Beat broadcasts with full transcripts were added to the Libraries' digital collections.
As of December 2019, the previously inaccessible, full-length interviews have been integrated into the Don Swaim Collection. This collection now contains 888 records of audio of interviews and radio broadcasts. Each interview and its resulting Book Beat broadcasts are grouped together and include a full transcriptions of the Book Beat broadcast.
You can review and access the full collection
HERE
Please contact Bill Kimok, University Archivist and Records Manager, with questions and comments.
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Ohio University Alden Libraries
SHOWCASE ANTHOLOGY
More than twenty members of the Bucks County Writers Workshop, past and present, plied their craft into a new showcase anthology, Stolen Verbs, Lawless Nouns. As founder of the BCWW and executive editor and publisher, Don Swaim worked with managing editor John Schoffstall and associate editors LCW Allingham, Candace Barrett, and Natalie Zellat Dyen to bring this major collection to life. in print & digital
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BOOK BEAT'S HISTORY Broadcasting was a different world in 1967 when CBS began an all-news radio operation on its 50,000-watt WCBS, New York, flagship of its seven owned-and-operated AM stations. Then, WCBS broadcast a daily book review with contributions from the staff voiced by Dick Reeves. Don Swaim, a former television news editor from Baltimore, contributed regularly to this feature, transcripts of which were distributed to the news media. An excerpt from Swaim's review of an oral biography of Harry S Truman appeared in the New York Post on March 2, 1974:
 click to enlarge
By late 1982, Swaim, who had been reporting on books and authors for the station (per the above) for several years (as well as a contributor to a CBS-FM broadcast, "Crosstalk"), proposed a daily feature, "Book Beat," to which staff members, one of whom was WCBS political reporter Steve Flanders, would contribute. Flanders' sudden death scotched that idea, and Swaim embarked on the five-day-a-week feature alone. The executives in charge were Mike Ludlum and Lou Adler. Its first broadcast was January 3, 1983, with a profile of William Styron.
Later, the network's CBS Radio Stations News Service originally headed by Joe Durso, Jr., made "Book Beat" available nationwide. Over the years, more than 700 writers, famous and unknown, were interviewed. "Book Beat's" final broadcast was September 9, 1993, with an interview with Ray Bradbury on the 40th anniversary of Farenheit 451.
BOOK BEAT vs BOOK BEAT
Chicago journalist and champion of Ambrose Bierce, Vincent Starrett, was a frequent guest on the first broadcast with the title "Book Beat," which was launched in 1964 by Robert Cromie, book editor for the Chicago Tribune. The author-interview show originated at WTTW, Channel 11, PBS, in Chicago each Monday night, and was syndicated to some sixty PBS TV stations until 1980. The show won Cromie, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety, a Peabody Award.
Swaim's more modest radio feature with the same name, "Book Beat," launched in 1982, and was broadcast three times a day on WCBS-AM, New York, and syndicated by the CBS Radio Stations News Service. It ended in 1993
POSTSCRIPT
There was uncertainty as to how to preserve this remarkable archive. Finally, the raw interviews, all on tape, were acquired by the Telecommunications Center of Ohio University in Athens, which digitized the unedited Book Beat interviews and posted them on its Wired for Books site. The founder of the site, David Kurz, preserved the audio after the site went dark in 2016, even as the Ohio University libraries began re-digitizing the interviews from the original tapes, along with transcripts, a project that took three years to complete.
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Ray Bradbury to Don Swaim:
Gov Mario Cuomo's Sitting Board
One day in August, 1992, I dashed past a burly man in a suit, a surprised security guy it turned out, and into the 16th floor men's room of the CBS Building. There, at the urinal, was the Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo. As he and I stood next to each other performing our tasks, the governor turned to me, whom he recognized, saying, "We've got to stop meeting like this." From anyone else it would have been a rather lame, modestly funny, joke, but from the Governor of New York...
Cuomo had a bad back and whenever he went to CBS for an interview he sat on a board. One day he left, forgetting his board, abandoned on the seat of his chair. I phoned his flack to say the governor had forgotten his sitting-board, but the flack told me to keep it because he had several of them. On it are his signature and the great seal of New York. So I kept it. I still have the very board on which Governor Cuomo parked his ass, and upon which I now park mine. —DS
click images to enlarge
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Previous postings on Book Beat /Wired for Books:
ARCHIVES #7
2018
HERE
ARCHIVES #6
2017
HERE
ARCHIVES #5
2015-2016
HERE
ARCHIVES #4
2014
HERE
ARCHIVES #3
2013
HERE
ARCHIVES #2
2010-2012
HERE
ARCHIVES #1
2008-2009
HERE
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SEARCH
BOOK BEAT, a daily feature about books and writers, was broadcast on WCBS-AM in New York from 1982 through 1993 and syndicated nationally by the CBS Radio Stations News Service (CBS RSNS). Not mere commentary, the broadcasts featured the actual voices of hundreds of prominent writers interviewed by Don Swaim at CBS in New York.
Don Swaim, 2023
photo by Melissa D. Sullivan
Don at CBS
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Copyright Advice
Permission to use Don's interviews may be obtained from Bill Kimok, University Archivist and Records Manager. 740-593-2696 -- email.
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Some 3000 daily CBS Book Beat radio broadcasts are archived below in chronological order. To find a specific author type the author name in the search box below or browse the listings by year.
DON'S SECRET MUSINGS 1985
click photos to enlarge
Stanley Elkin 4/16/85
"Stan, lemme try to explain something to you about the craft of fiction."
listen
John Irving 5/24/85 "John, now if I'd written 'Garp' I would have ended it this way..."
listen
Jane Ann Phillips 5/21/85 "This gal needs a personal writing tutor, and I'm just the guy."
listen
Paul Theroux 5/27/85 "Paul, you may have gone to Timbuktu, but never to Asbury Park in January."
listen
MIGHTA BEEN
A TV STAR
BOOK "MARKS" TV DEMOS
Two six-minute TV pilots with Don Swaim interviewing humorist Roy Blount, Jr., and novelist Hugh Nissenson for a show taped in 1987 for Walden Books. The project went nowhere, but the demos survive. Click on images below to start the Quicktime movies.
 Roy Blount
Hugh Nissenson
Radio Dreams
A broadcast-journalist’s early career through and including Book Beat—
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