Episode 8 • What of the Night, by Cyrus Lillian, adapted from Djuna Barnes

What of the Night was adapted for radio by Cyrus Lillian from Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood.

Featuring Amanda Davies as Fiona, Norbert Weisser as Felix, William Wintersole as Doctor O’Connor, Marlene Silverstein as Nora, Valerie Snyder as Robin, Frederic Downs as The Priest, and Bill Hunt and Paul Vangelisti in miscellaneous roles.

Directed by William Wintersole and Paul Vangelisti, with engineering by Ed Hammond.

This performance was first broadcast on KPFK on January 12, 1982. Special thanks to Pacifica Radio Archives for their generous support. Explore their extensive collections here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org

Brought to you by Magra Radio, an infrequent broadcast experiment of Magra Books.

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Djuna Barnes

The American author Djuna Barnes is perhaps best remembered for her novel Nightwood, a modernist classic that depicts a complex sapphic affair. Despite this impression, it is as a working artist, playwright, poet, editor, and journalist where she offered a range of cultural contributions while battling a long-simmering rage and often passionately holding contradictory positions on topics inclusive of but not limited to lesbianism, literary taste, and legacy.

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Djuna BarnesMagra BooksOctober 26, 2025radio play, Djuna Barnes

Episode 7 • Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka

Dutchman was written by Amiri Baraka.

This recording features Shelly Parsons as Lula, and Winston Butler as Clay, with a special appearance by Joe Clark as The Drunk.

The score was composed and performed by Bob Fraser. Directed by Paul Vangelisti.

Brought to you by Magra Radio, an infrequent broadcast experiment of Magra Books.

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Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka (1934–2014), born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, was a poet, playwright, essayist, and activist whose work spanned more than five decades. A central figure in the Beat movement, Black Arts Movement, and Black Power era, Baraka fused art with radical politics, exploring themes of race, identity, and resistance. His early works, like Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), evolved into searing revolutionary texts such as Black Magic(1969). Baraka’s plays, including Dutchman (1964), challenged racial and cultural complacency. Fierce, controversial, and prolific, he remains one of America’s most influential and uncompromising literary voices.

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Amiri BarakaMagra BooksSeptember 17, 2024Amiri Baraka, radio play

Episode 6 • The Aging Comedian as the Letter N, by Bill Mohr

Bill Mohr performs the monologue The Comedian as the Letter N, 2019.

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Bill Mohr

Bill Mohr is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, where he has taught since 2006, after receiving his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. In 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992. His reviews, articles, and commentary have also appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry Flash, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, Hungry Mind Review, New Review of Literature, OR, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Beyond Baroque NEW.

Mohr has a chapter on L.A. poetry forthcoming in a volume entitled “L.A.: A Literary History” from Cambridge University Press in 2026 as well as an essay forthcoming in a CUP volume celebrating the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. Prior to his career as an academic, Mohr made his living at various occupations, including working as a blueprint machine operator and typesetter. During this time, he was the editor and publisher of Momentum Press, which he founded in 1974 (www.koankinship.com)

In addition to being translated into Spanish, Italian, Croatian, and Japanese, Mohr’s poems have appeared in over 20 anthologies. Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). What Books will publish Remiges: Collected Longer Poems in the fall 2026.

Mohr has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute and been honored with Beyond Baroque’s George Drury Smith Award. His literary and editorial archives are at the Archive for New Poetry in the Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.

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Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.

ISBN: 979-8-9926955-1-9
Pub. Date: April 15, 2026

Bruce Boyd

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Bill Mohr

Displacements

Bill Mohr

$10.00

DISPLACEMENTS features two previously unpublished prose poems, as well as a monologue and a sermon. If the mutability of collage, as Alan Wald suggests, engenders the poetic logic of prose poems, Mohr's comic permissiveness tethers their unfamiliar juxtapositions with puckish vivacity. The other pair of pieces strike a more contumacious note in the narrator's refusal to reconcile himself to a specious fate. In each work the lift-off of each sentence pushes aside not only what has preceded it, but the recoil of what might yet happen.

Bill Mohr

Magra BooksMay 7, 2019radio play, Bill Mohr

Episode 5 • Breathing Space '79, part 2

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Episode 4 • Breathing Space '79, part 1

International anthology of sound poetry by Arrigolora Totino, Carl Stone, Jim Roche, Larry Wendt, Co-Accident, Paul Vangelisti, Adriano Spatola and F. Tiziano, Dominic Alleluia, Giacomo Balla, Fortunato de Pero, Bob Davis, Lily Greenham, Donna Henes, Lawrence Kucharz, Giulia Niccolai, Audio Players, Bill Gaglione, Ed Rossman, E.T. Simon, Tony Gnazzo, Milli Graffi, Julien Blaine, William Moylan

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Episode 3 • Interview with Dennis Phillips

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Dennis Phillips

The Cartographer's Lament

Dennis Phillips

$19.00

Pub. Date: November 14, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-2-6

Magra Books is pleased to announce the publication of The Cartographer’s Lament, by Dennis Phillips. Now included in this masterful, book-length sequence, Magra first published Phillips’ 17 Meditations on Time in 2021. The poet, in his Lament, seeks to capture the evanescent, to grasp the ungraspable, wrestling with that oldest and most unmappable of mysteries, time. In this remarkable project, Phillips shows himself to be a true practitioner of the impossible.

Book designed by River Jukes-Hudson
with Drawings by Courtney Gregg

Dennis Phillips

Sonnets

Dennis Phillips

$10.00

As with his two previous titles for Magra Books, Desert Sequence and 17 Meditations on Time, Dennis Phillips continues his explorations into harmony and time with this sequence of 14-line poems, Sonnets. His rhythms respond to the pulse of everyday life, with a language consistently tuneful and precise. From his readings of Dante to the early sunlight lending grace to the trees outside his window, the poet steadfastly dwells in these brief excursions.

Drawings by Courtney Gregg.

Dennis Phillips

Dennis Phillips

17 Meditations on Time

Dennis Phillips

$10.00

In 17 Meditations on Time Dennis Phillips tries to capture the evanescent, to grasp the ungraspable, wrestling with that oldest and most unmappable of mysteries, time. In 2019 Talisman House brought out Mappa Mundi, Phillips’ 17th volume of poetry. With Mappa Mundi the book setting a predicate for “Mappa Mundi” the project, Phillips has written a second volume, The Cartographer’s Lament. Continuing the exploration of themes and variations, the Lament consists of ten sections, of which “17 Meditations on Time” is the second section.

Dennis Phillips

Magra BooksOctober 23, 2017poetry, interview, poetry reading, literature, literary, Dennis Phillips

Episode 2 • The Dodo, or The School for Night

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Also by Corrado Costa

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Corrado Costa

The Dodo: or the School for Night

Corrado Costa

$10.00

A previously uncollected and unpublished radio drama by the ground-breaking Italian poet Corrado Costa. Never part of Costa’s collected writings in Italian, The Dodo was composed in 1979-1980 for Pacifica Radio’s “Los Angeles Theater of the Ear” (L.A.T.E.) and premiered on KPFK Radio in Los Angeles in March 1980. The contemporary and the ancient mix in dizzying fashion in this one-act drama, driving the listener/reader to seek shelter in a shelter-less and unremitting aural landscape. “Who’s there?” one is finally forced to exclaim, along with the main character ringing, as well as the characters answering their door bells.

With several of Corrado Costa’s witty & curious drawings to highlight the script.

Corrado Costa

Magra BooksOctober 23, 2017Corrado Costa, the dodo, radio, radio play, translation, literature

Episode 1 • An Evening with Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges interviewed in 1976 in Los Angeles at UCLA.

Special thanks to the Pacifica Radio Archive for their generous support. Explore their extensive collections here: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org

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Magra BooksOctober 23, 2017Jorge Luis Borges, interview, literature, literary, poetry

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