(Free) Author Interviews by Don Swaim / 'Book Beat' archive

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

I stumbled upon this yesterday and it's a bit of a treasure trove! I'm not familiar with him, but Don Swaim had a short radio segment distributed nationally by CBS in the 80s and early 90s called 'Book Beat'. He interviewed a tonne of authors in his time there and this site:

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

has the complete interviews before they were edited down for the radio slot. Under 'A' there's Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Martin Amis, Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Paul Auster, ... you get the idea. The interviews are in the Real format - I know Realplayer isn't exactly popular, but you can avoid installing it by using Real Alternative which plays the files through Media Player Classic:

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

On top of that, Don's own website has an archive of the actual 'Book Beat' shows in mp3 format:

http://donswaim.com/bookbeatpodcast.html