New Comics Wednesday audio links, plus Richard Nixon and Art Garfunkel

Looking for something else, I stumbled over WIRED FOR BOOKS -- a remarkable archive of writer audio interviews and readings. I particularly enjoyed this 1991 interview with Art Spiegelman, conducted shortly after he finished the second half of MAUS. Since then, Artie has become such a professional raconteur/interview subject that it's endearing to hear him stumble around a bit here. It's pretty exciting and appropriate to see there's a chat with underground-comix godfather Harvey Kurtzman in the archive -- from 1985, so Harvey is still pretty incandescent when given the opportunity.

[Another comicsy one, if you must: Rick Obadiah of First Comics/Classics Illustrated.]

Other Don Swaim interviews of note in the archive:

William Kennedy

Elmore Leonard

Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)

Isaac Asimov

Ray Bradbury

Oliver Sacks

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Norman Mailer

Studs Terkel

James Jones

Jerzy Kosinski

Susan Sontag

Gore Vidal

Tobias Wolff

Walter Tevis and Jamie Tevis

Andrea Dworkin

Andrew Sarris

Douglas Adams

Martin Amis

Paul Auster

Clive Barker

Carl Bernstein

Judy Blume

Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff on Ayn Rand

Jimmy Breslin

Art Buchwald

Christopher Buckley and William F. Buckley

Anthony Burgess

William Burroughs

Jim Carroll

Raymond Carver

Robertson Davies

John Dean

Ariel Dorfman

Bret Easton Ellis

Bruce Jay Friedman

Fred Friendly

Charles Fecher on H. L. Mencken

Paul Fussell

Art Garfunkel

Don George on Duke Ellington

Brendan Gill on Frank Lloyd Wright

Sir Alec Guinness [this was probably the "something else" I was originally looking for]

Pete Hamill

Joseph Heller

Nat Hentoff

Michael Herr

Patricia Highsmith

S.E. Hinton

Robert Hughes

Clifford Irving

Erica Jong

Ring Lardner, Jr.

Alison Lurie

Rod McKuen

Richard Nixon

George Plimpton

Victor Navasky

Mr. Fred Rogers

Budd Schulberg

John Sayles

Michael Schnayerson on Irwin Shaw

Norman Sherry on Graham Greene

Gay Talese

Amy Tan

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Peter Viertel

Elie Wiesel

And Henny Youngman

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