Book Beat: The Podcast/Wired for Books

Book Beat/Wired for Books: Don Swaim's online audio interviews with the
best-known writers of three decades, author updates, and more



Don Photo Gallery
HERE

Don’s Houses
Where I’ve lived
HERE



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. Bauer
    Don 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

    The hundreds of Don's unedited, complete CBS Radio Book Beat author interviews can be heard on the Internet in alphabetical order:
    HERE

    Some 3,000 of Don's two-minute syndicated CBS broadcasts based on the unedited interviews can be found chronologically by year below:
  • Book Beat 1982
  • Book Beat 1983
  • Book Beat 1984
  • Book Beat 1985
  • Book Beat1986
  • Book Beat1987
  • Book Beat1988
  • Book Beat1989
  • Book Beat 1990
  • Book Beat 1991
  • Book Beat 1992
  • Book Beat 1993

  • CENSORSHIP!
    It's Far From New

    Book Beat reported on the issue back in the 80s, talking to such luminaries as Barney Rossett (who fought for Lady Chatterley's Lover), Kurt Vonnegut, Evan Hunter, and Judy Blume. It's an enlightening five-part series (dirty words and all), that stills hold up.
    Listen HERE

    It was a big day (for me) when NORMAN MAILER and his entourage trooped in to be interviewed for my little daily book feature. I was expecting the worse as he had taken up prize fighting and often greeted people by butting them with his forehead. But he couldn't have been more gracious--and later I got an invitation to visit his summer place in Provincetown (which didn't pan out). This shot appeared in Publisher's Weekly, Oct. 25, 1991.



    cover art by Patricia Allingham Carlson

    The Fall/Winter 2023 edition of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal features a stunning landscape by Patricia Allingham Carlson, who was profiled in this issue just days before her death on September 10. In a separate article, "Purdy and Me: Don't Feed Him Because He Might Get Nasty," Don Swaim describes his ten-year friendship with the controversial author James Purdy), whose best known novel, Malcolm, was created in a Bucks County farmhouse. By Daniel Dorian, a profile of the venerable Bucks County Workshop after a quarter of a century of helping to inspire local writers. AND MUCH MORE! Available 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.





    DELIVERANCE OF SINNERS
    From the scholarly to the playful, this melange of essays, humor, biography, history, fiction, self-reflection, even a short play, is built around the author's decades-long predilection for all things Bierce. Don Swaim launched the definitive website dedicated to the myth and mind of Bierce in 1996, and his novel The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story conceptualizes the Bierce saga in unpredictable ways. Available HERE


    REVIEW BY GREYDOGTALES

    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.




    Ray Bradbury to Don Swaim:


    THIS BOOK THING?

    To find out what this is about click HERE


    A Book Collector's Journey
    The search for the elusive "Kipe Offset" variant of the 1945 illustrated edition of Steinbeck's classic novella took years, but most bibliphiles have to be a little mad. My illustrated essay describes the quest for The Red Pony and a little about the mind of a book collector. Read HERE --Don Swaim


    DOSSIER
    How I almost read the inaugral poem at the swearing-in of Donald J. Trump
    HERE



    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





    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



    SEARCH

    Find the hundreds of authors interviewed by Don Swaim with the above search box.

    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
    photo by Melissa D. Sullivan



    Below are listed some of the outstanding, award-winning authors interviewed by Don Swaim for CBS Radio's Book Beat & subsequently posted on Ohio University's Wired for Books. This is only a partial list. click to listen

    AMERICAN BOOK AWARD
    Russell Banks | Sandra Cisneros | Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | William Kennedy | Paule Marshall | Toni Morrison | Gary Snyder | Art Spiegelman | John Edgar Wideman

    BOOKER PRIZE
    Margaret Atwood | John Banville | Ian McEwan | Kazuo Ishiguro | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |Thomas Keneally | Bernice Rubens | Graham Swift | Barry Unsworth

    EDGAR AWARD
    Lawrence Block |Mary Higgins Clark | Dick Francis | Frederick Forsyth | Tony Hillerman | P. D. James | Stuart Kaminsky | Elmore Leonard | Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) |Robert B. Parker | T. Jefferson Parker | Ruth Rendell | Joseph Wambaugh | Donald Westlake | Aaron Elkins

    HUGO AWARD
    Isaac Asimov | Ray Bradbury |
    Anne McCaffrey

    LEWIS THOMAS SCIENCE WRITING
    Oliver Sacks


    LITERARIAN AWARD
    Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    DISTINGUISHED MEDAL TO AMERICAN LETTERS
    Judy Blume | Ray Bradbury | Joan Didion | James Laughlin | Norman Mailer | Toni Morrison | Adrienne Rich | Studs Terkel| John Updike

    NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
    John Barth | T. Coraghessan Boyle | James Carroll | James Dickey | Joan Didion | E. L. Doctorow | Richard Eberhart | Allen Ginsberg | John Irving | James Jones |Tracy Kidder | Maxine Hong Kingston | Jerzy Kosinski | Jonathan Kozol | Louis L'Amour |Barry Lopez |Paul Monette | Toni Morrison | Joyce Carol Oates | William L. Shirer |Susan Sontag | Robert Stone | William Styron | John Updike | Gore Vidal

    NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE
    E. L. Doctorow | Stanley Elkin | John C. Gardner | William Kennedy | Toni Morrison | Reynolds Price | Jane Smiley | John Updike

    NOBEL PRIZE
    Gunter Grass | Doris Lessing | Elie Weisel| Toni Morrison| Kazuo Ishiguro

    PEN-FAULKNER FICTION AWARD
    T. Coraghessan Boyle | Michael Cunningham | E. L. Doctorow | John Updike | John Edgar Wideman | Richard Wiley |Tobias Wolff

    PULITZER PRIZE
    Carl Bernstein | Robert Olen Butler | Michael Cunningham | Richard Eberhart | Oscar Hijuelos | Stanley Karnow | William Kennedy | Tracy Kidder | Alison Lurie | Norman Mailer | Toni Morrison |Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | Studs Terkel | John Updike


    NEW YORK PIBLIC LIBRARY LITERARY LION
    Kurt Vonnegut | Stanley Elkin

    Don at CBS


    Copyright Advice

    Permission to use Don's interviews may be obtained from Bill Kimok, University Archivist and Records Manager. 740-593-2696 -- email.





    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



    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—
    [audio runs 17 minutes]

  • RADIO DAYS
    college days of a would-be broadcaster — a memoir
    of angst & anxiety here
     
  • Don’s Houses
    Where He’s Lived

    HERE




    DON'S OTHER SITES

  • WCBS Appreciation Site 
  • Book Beat: The Podcast 
  • Wired for Books  
  • Radio Days  
  • Aspinwall High School  
  • Ambrose Bierce Site  
  • Bucks County Writers Workshop 
  • Errata  
  • Steinbeck in Bucks Co  
  • Pennsylvania Sunsets  
  • Growing Up in WW Two  
  • Don's Houses: Where I've Been  
  • Fighting the Hun in WW One  
  • Stuart Cummings Ripley Site
  • Swaim Name in History
  • The Swaim in America


    Don's Photo Gallery HERE




    click Stylebook to read


    portrait of Don Swaim by
    James "Doc" Tuverson






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