I think Michael Silverblatt might be America’s best reader.  It amazes me how many people DON’T listen to his weekly show Bookworm which is on KCRW in Santa Monica, CA, but is podcast for all to hear, and can be found here (there’s some amazing archives too).  I began listening to Bookworm in binges while I biked an hour to and from campus each day in Tokyo.  Now I listen while I pencil my comics.  He has the ability to make even writers that I believe I will have no interest in absolutely compelling. He’s dogged and never panders to his guests nor does he turn his nose up at them, no matter how much smarter and more insightful he usually is that the writers who sit across from him.  And his taste is uncannily in tune with my own, his personal literary universe stemming from Beckett, Barth and Barthelme (the killer b’s, the Wu Tang Clan of postmodernism).  Anyway, Michael Silverblatt just gets it, and there’s is no one else that I can stand to listen for hours on end (except maybe “The Schmooze,” Steve Somers).

Read Silverblatt’s article from Good magazine on the the vitality of independent publishing in America. As always, he restores our faith in contemporary literature.