Podcast: Interview with Alberto Manguel (1983)

 

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. Today, in honour of Halloween, it seems timely to revisit the day, in 1983, when I sat down with Argentine-Canadian novelist, essayist and translator Alberto Manguel.

Author of non-fiction texts such as A History of Reading (1996) and most recently Curiosity (2015), in his long career Manguel has edited numerous anthologies of short fiction. At the time of our conversation in 1983, his first such volume, Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, had just been published. The massive book collected short works of fantasy, many appearing in English for the first time, from the sinister to the humorous, from authors like Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Julio Cortázar, and Charles Dickens. In 2016, Manguel took over as director of the National Library of Argentina.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Alberto Manguel as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Talking Out of Turn: A Collection of Reviews, Interviews and Remembrances currently being assembled on Blogger. 

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.