Michael Silverblatt

Michael Silverblatt (born August 6, 1952) is a literary critic and American broadcaster who hosted Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program focusing on books and literature, from 1989 to 2022.

He recorded over 1,600 interviews with authors and other literary figures, including David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, William Gass, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery.

Bookworm was broadcast by Los Angeles public radio station KCRW.

A lifelong voracious reader, Silverblatt was born in Queens, New York, into a Jewish family, attended SUNY Buffalo, majored in English, then entered postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out.

Later, he moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a screenwriter.

But after impressing KCRW's general manager during a discussion of Russian poetry at a dinner party, he was offered his own radio show.

On Bookworm, Silverblatt interviewed a variety of writers, including W. G. Sebald, T. C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, William Gass, Zadie Smith, Steve Erickson, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Tao Lin, Joshua Cohen, Maggie Nelson, Dave Eggers, Ann Beattie, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Richard Powers.

He called his interviews "conversations" and did not use prompts or question sheets.

Critics and interviewees noted Silverblatt's preparedness; he always read his interviewee's work in advance.

Underwritten by the Lannan Foundation, Bookworm was distributed free of charge to around 50 U.S. radio stations.

Silverblatt worked on the show unpaid for its first five years.

Silverblatt coined the term transgressive fiction.

Silverblatt's Los Angeles Times review of William Gass's The Tunnel was blurbed on the cover of its paperback release: "The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime."

Silverblatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of Kenward Elmslie's The Orchid Stories.

In 2018, Silverblatt was the inaugural recipient of the Deborah Pease Prize, awarded by A Public Space magazine for being a "figure who has advanced the art of literature".

In 2023, The Song Cave published Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt, a selection of notable interviews by Silverblatt.