Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
He died after a protracted illness, said Joan Bykofsky, his sister and only immediate survivor.
In the course of promotional tours, authors often encounter radio, TV and print journalists who can appear grossly ignorant of the writers’ work. Mr. Silverblatt, by contrast, often left his literary guests reeling with the sense they were not in a basement studio of KCRW, the Southern California NPR affiliate, but in the electric ambience of a Bloomsbury salon or a Left Bank cafe.
“Like others, I suspect, I’ve even had the sensation of being interviewed by him and thinking, ‘Is it possible that this guy has given more consideration to this passage than I, the author, did?’” David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and top editor of The New Yorker, wrote in an email.
Mr. Silverblatt, whose nationally syndicated show aired from 1989 to 2022, once described himself as “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.”
He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. (He lived in Fairfax District, near Hollywood, where he rented an apartment next door to use as a library.)
“He abhorred the ordinary, the banal, the easy,” Mr. Remnick wrote. “It was almost to the point where writers came to think that the best thing about publishing — well, almost — is that Michael Silverblatt would read you.”
Guests on his program included Salman Rushdie, John Ashbery, William H. Gass, Grace Paley, Stephen Sondheim, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.
“The purpose of the show is to help my listeners look through writers’ eyes,” Mr. Silverblatt told The New York Times in 1999.
“It’s to show them,” he added, “whether they’re reading or not, how writers re-enchant the world, how they surround us with the miraculous. That’s what books do to me and what I want my show to do, to remind people how odd and special writers’ minds and imaginations are.”
Interviewing Ms. Didion in 2013 about “Blue Nights,” a memoir and wrenching reflection on the death of her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, eight years earlier, Mr. Silverblatt began: “It seems to me in this book you rip open really incredible wounds. You open the possibility that you haven’t been a good mother. I think most parents would rather die.”
Ms. Didion replied that most parents feel “that they haven’t been good parents,” adding, “whether they admit it or not. Most people don’t admit most stuff.”
“Why is that possible for you?” he asked.
“It’s necessary for me to admit the absolute worst that I can imagine,” she answered.
The novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in an email that Mr. Silverblatt was “gifted with what must have been a near-photographic memory for prose — idealistic, passionate, intense, a joy to be with — irreplaceable.”
He was “the reader writers dream about,” she said.
Michael Philip Silverblatt was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 6, 1952, and grew up in Queens. His mother, Lorraine (Goldman) Silverblatt, was a comptroller. His father, Herbert, owned an import-export business.
Mr. Silverblatt said Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was the book that had made him an avid reader as a child. The public library became a second home.
After graduating from Bayside High School, he enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he met esteemed critics and authors, including John Barth, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Creeley, who taught there. They broadened his literary tastes to include the experimental and avant-garde.
His parents had pushed him to major in math, but he quickly abandoned that subject and switched to English, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1974.
Mr. Silverblatt briefly enrolled in graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University but became bored with academic life. He then tried the publishing industry in New York but found it elitist. By 1980, he had relocated to California, where he worked in bookstores and as a publicist for TV shows while struggling to write books of his own and screenplays.
Attending a dinner party in 1988, he was overheard by Ruth Seymour, the founder and general manager of KCRW, discussing the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who had died in one of Stalin’s 1930s purges.
“They spoke for hours about Russian poetry,” said the poet Alan Felsenthal, who edited the interview compilation “Bookworm: Conversations With Michael Silverblatt” (2023).
“Recognizing his gifts, Ruth asked him if he’d like to host a radio show about books,” Mr. Felsenthal said. “At first, Michael didn’t believe in interviewing writers. He didn’t want to do it. He thought it was a violation of the essential privacy of the imagination. But what if it could be done with tenderness and enchantment? A good interview, Michael says, is an act of hypnosis.”
He voluntarily worked without pay at first — the studio was on the campus of Santa Monica College — but after five years he received underwriting for the show from the Lannan Foundation, which supports the arts with an emphasis on freedom of expression.
That freedom, to Mr. Silverblatt, was the animating principle behind “Bookworm.”
“There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”
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