Mark Seinfelt Mark Seinfelt

Today, my father Dr. Frederick William Seinfelt again joins me on Word Patriots. We will be discussing Shakespeare on film and which cinematic versions of the plays speak most to us and why. We talk about the first three American sound films of Shakespeare: the 1929 Pickford Corporation’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Max Reinhardt’s […] The post Word Patriots – Seinfelt and Shakespeare Filmography appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Word Patriots often fall under the spell of the written word and find their vocation early in life. Several months ago, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. Still it doesn’t seem very long ago since I was a high school student enrolled in Kay Hutton’s Nobel Prize authors and AP English classes or since I represented […] The post Word Patriots – Samantha Schyuler and Stephen Urchick appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Today’s program is one of our periodic shows devoted to past masters, heroic word patriots who overcame great obstacles, who wrote in new and innovative ways, or who defied convention by visiting formerly taboo topics and thereby opened new fields of exploration for literature. On this episode of Word Patriots we will be discussing the […] The post Word Patriots – O’Dell on O’Connor appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Professor Emerita, still teaches courses in creative writing and myth and started a myth/folklore Studies Center at IUP. She is the co-editor of “Life on the Line,” author of “Going to Bed Whole,” “Tottering Palaces,” “The Approximate Message” and most recently “In the Fall of a Sparrow,” commissioned […] The post Word Patriots – Rosaly Roffman’s “I Want To Thank My Eyes appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

The late Stanley Elkin was a two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, including “A Bad Man,” “George Mills,” “The Rabbi of Lud” and “Mrs. Ted Bliss,” he is recognized for his humorous and satirical fiction and for the stylistic virtuosity of […] The post Word Patriots – William Gass remembers Stanley Elkin appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Since the publication of “Huckleberry Finn” in 1885, countless readers, all small-town boys-at-heart, who envied and wanted to trade places with the free-as-a-bird Huck, have drifted down the Mississippi with him and his easy to fool, credulous yet capable and levelheaded companion Jim, whose thoughts constantly turn to his family still in servitude, following them […] The post Word Patriots – Joanna Scott’s “Follow Me” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Darryl Strawberry was one of the most feted and prolific sluggers in baseball. Fans dubbed him the Black Ted Williams. An eight-time All-Star, a four-time World Series Champion, and a National League Rookie of the Year, he played for the Mets, Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees. His dazzling achievements […] The post Word Patriots – Darryl Strawberry’s “Finding My Way” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Among the many named and unnamed heroes of World War Two, when the Nazis sought to control the genome of the entire planet and to eliminate a race of people from the face of the earth, were the rescuers who provided a safe haven for those being methodically herded, in Antonina Zabinski’s words, to the […] The post Word Patriots – Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Welcome everyone. My guest this week is David Alan Johnson, the author of “Decided on the Battlefield: Grant, Sherman, Lincoln and the Election of 1864,” which was published by Prometheus Books this past January. David is the author of many popular histories, including “Betrayal: The True Story of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nazi Saboteurs,” […] The post Word Patriots – David Alan Johnson’s “Decided on the Battlefield” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Welcome everyone. This week’s show is our third devoted to the work of master novelist Paul West and we will be examining his historical novels and his writings of the 1990s and the 2000s. Paul will also be celebrating his 82nd birthday this week, so my guests and I will all be saluting him and […] The post Word Patriots – Paul West, Historical Novels and Later Fictions appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

This week on Word Patriots my guest is Donald Anderson, author of the contemporary short-story cycle, “Fire Road.” Donald was born in Butte, Montana in 1946 and he is a dedicated practitioner of the short story form. His fiction and essays have appeared in “The North American Review,” “Fiction International,” “Epoch,” “PRISM international,” “Western Humanities […] The post Word Patriots – Donald Anderson’s “Fire Road” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

This week on Word Patriots, we welcome Turk back into the studio, and I comment upon the eerie coincidence that while Turk was in the hospital, I was reading next week’s guest Donald Anderson’ s short story cycle “Fire Road,” in which the protagonist Stephan Mann undergoes the very same surgical procedure that Turk underwent […] The post Word Patriots – Turk asks about “At Last The Distinguished Thing” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

This episode of Word Patriots is devoted to the fiction of the enigmatic prose virtuoso Thomas Pynchon, the author of such seminal works as “The Crying of Lot 49,” which the “New York Times” characterized as a “streamlined doomsday machine,” and which deals with a world-wide conspiracy involving the forging of stamps and ancient books […] The post Word Patriots – Kress on Pynchon appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Due to the hospitalization of my producer Donnie “Turk” Schnars this week, we are re-broadcasting my July interview with the noted poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. Diane is the author of over two-dozen books. Many know her as the author of the best-selling “A Natural History of the Senses.” She hosted a five-hour PBS television […] The post Word Patriots – Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names For Love (encore) appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

A.J. Ali is the creator, executive producer and star of “Good Fellas of Baltimore,” which debuted on Fox 45 TV in the Baltimore market in the spring of 2011 and was responsible for raising more than a quarter million dollars worth of support for charity in the Baltimore area in one year. He is currently […] The post Word Patriots – A Conversation with A.J. Ali appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

This week we will be paying tribute to authors around the world who died in 2011 with special recognition to one of our own, the late Theo Matthews. In this special episode, we mourn the passing and celebrate the lifework of such diverse word patriots as Vaclav Havel, Christa Wolf, Ernesto Sabato, Jorge Semprún, Allen […] The post Word Patriots – In Memoriam 2011 appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

The 1980s was a particularly fertile period for author Paul West. He began and closed the decade with two of his finest historical novels, “The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg” in 1980 and “Lord Byron’s Doctor” in 1989. He published the first volume of his Sheer Fiction series, a collection of essays drawn […] The post Word Patriots – Paul West, Writings of the 1980s appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Poetry had its beginnings as an oral art form. The sung lyric and the chanted narrative were, perhaps, one of the first forms of public entertainment. Gathered around a communal fire or chieftain’s hearth, audiences found their evening’s recreation in listening to a poet’s verse narrative. The Iliad, it has been estimated, would have taken […] The post Word Patriots – Big Hollow Road appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Charles Dickens’ name had become so associated with Christmas that in 1870 a little costermonger’s girl in London, having been informed that Dickens had died, asked, “Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” David Purdue writes: “It was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece ‘A Christmas Carol,’ that rekindled the […] The post Word Patriots – Dickens and Christmas appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

For many word patriots, their role in the literary world is clearly defined, often by a particular strength, such as a writer’s creativity, an editor’s attention to detail or a publisher’s business acumen. Not so for my guest this week, Ronda Winchell Sharp, whose roles have included writer, publisher, editor, graphic designer, consultant, critic and […] The post Word Patriots – Rhonda Winchell Sharp’s “The Nine Most Famous Reindeer of All” appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.