Now on sale
Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
OUTTAKE! In BOMB’s print issue, Mike Davis and Lucy Raven tour California’s El Cajon, the author’s hometown. Read on for more of Davis’s perspective on the unique growth and evolution of El Cajon.
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The booming business of the Mexico/U.S. border: Davis, chronicler extraordinaire of these apocalyptic times, connects the dots between the War on Terror, the War against Drugs, Immigration and Homeland Security.
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OUTTAKE! Zachary Lazar’s second novel, Sway, interlaces fictional accounts of some of the ’60s most iconic headliners. In this outtake they discuss the historical novel and art’s dwindling ability to shock.
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An email conversation as unpredictable as some of their characters—Edison, a devoted IRS employee, talking animals, a paranoid critic, and a ghostwriter working for injured athletes among them.
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Lazar’s second novel, Sway, interlaces fictional accounts of ‘60s headliners including Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards, Charles Manson, and Kenneth Anger.
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Amirthanayagam, born in Sri Lanka and currently an American diplomat, with England-based Zameenzad, on fundamentalism in the West and the Middle East, friendship, and the multilingual imagination.
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Interviewer Antonio Sergio Bessa translates three poems by Francisco Alvim. Read BOMB’s interview with Francisco Alvim by Antonio Sergio Bessa.
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Enjoy an excerpt of Bernardo Carvalho’s novel, Nine Nights, then check out his interview with cultural theorist Natalia Brizuela.
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Brazil’s prolific and legendary writer Lygia Fagundes Telles crosses literary time and space with Portugal’s own Manuel Alegre, novelist and presidential candidate.
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A career diplomat and wordsmith, Alvim’s cryptic poetry—observations with the geometrical brevity of haiku, or shrapnel—spans five decades. WEB EXTRA: three Alvim poems translated by Antonio Sergio Bessa.
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Carvalho returns to the modernist project in his adventurous novels — saturated with desire and ambiguity, dislocation and theatricality. WEB EXTRA: Read an excerpt from Carvalho’s novel Nine Nights!
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Through the protagonist of his long-awaited first novel, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz weaves an epic tale of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic and its diaspora, complete with sci-fi metaphors.
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David Malouf is Australia’s preeminent author. Knopf just released The Complete Stories, his astonishing collection that spans the 20th century. Colm Tóibín queries Malouf on the casualties of war and the dual nature of Australia’s history.
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Susan Sontag called A Book of Memories “the greatest novel written in our time.” With the first English translation of his new book, Fire and Knowledge, Nádas reflects on the synchronism of differences.
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The celebrated author of The Bird Artist — an intrepid traveler and award-winning translator of Native American and Inuit folktales — discusses his latest novel, Devotion.
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Lore Segal’s Shakespeare’s Kitchen, explores personal and historical events with startling insight. Playwright and novelist Han Ong reminisces with the author, a 2008 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
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Cristina García, one of the most important Cuban American voices in literature, has a new novel, A Handbook to Luck. Chris Abani queries García on fate and free will.
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Saturn devoured his children to leave myths like those in The People of Paper, unfolded here in the form of an origami temptress and a cholo gang leader.
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The Family Tree (The Genealogies), the legendary Mexican writer and thinker’s shimmering Rashomon of her Jewish family’s past, is revisited on a drive to her childhood home in Mexico City.
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Tillman’s latest novel, American Genius, A Comedy, uses skin, that “illusory border between the body and the world,” as a fulcrum from which to explore an encyclopedic array of American subjects.
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Michèle Gerber Klein speaks with enigmatic poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, whose new collection, I Love Artists, is just out from the University of California Press.
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Laurie Sheck and fellow poet Kimiko Hahn, author of, most recently, The Narrow Road to the Interior. Sheck likens Hahn’s work to “a volcano wrapped in a cloud.”
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Julieta Campos’s early novels were populated by indefinable characters, situated in an almost abstract space-time. Her latest work, The Force of Destiny, is a saga of family and society spanning five centuries.
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Poet, translator and editor José Luis Rivas is a rare figure whose poems are appreciated by Mexican writers of all generations. Mónica de la Torre queried the author on pleasure and reading, and the influence of his family and childhood in Veracruz.
>>>Novelist Daniel Sada’s Because It Seems To Be a Lie the Truth Is Never Known, with its infamous octosyllabic meter, stunned Spanish-speaking readers when it came out in 1999. The novelist has been rebuilding the internal logic of language ever since.
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The American author of We Need to Talk About Kevin lives in London, a remove from which to consider our national psyche. Kevin juxtaposes the cracks in the polished surface of the American self-image with the interior fault lines in family life.
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The two poets are also essayists as well as translators. Weinberger’s latest book, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, traces the current administration’s controversial first term.
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Poet Susan Wheeler has two new books out: Ledger, which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and her first novel, Record Palace. Award-winning author Robert Polito finds out how a poet crosses over.
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“I start with an uneasiness. Somewhere a pattern’s undersung.” Thus is Heather McHugh inspired to one of her witty, contradictory, perspicacious, sometimes bawdy, always sense-soaked poems.
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Robert Antoni’s first novel, Divina Trace, stunned the literary world winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Antoni continues to explore the voluptuous and volatile Caribbean and the legacy of its New World bloodlines.
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In The Seventh Beggar, Pearl Abraham has created a novel about the nature of storytelling beginning with Genesis. She takes us into a world that ranges from golems to robotics, mystical systems to artificial intelligence.
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Novelist and poet Evelyne Trouillot comes from a prominent Port-au-Prince family of writers and intellectuals. Novelist Edwidge Danticat queried the writer on Haiti’s past and its future.
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Carlos Eire, a professor of history and religion at Yale, won a National Book Award for his first nonhistorical effort, Waiting for Snow in Havana, his memoir of a privileged childhood in Cuba disrupted by the revolution.
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Both first-rate novelists, Frederic Tuten and Jerome Charyn grew up in the Bronx, meeting as teenagers at the home of Fay Levine, the Bronx’s own Elizabeth Taylor. The two reminisce after the release of Charyn’s novel The Green Lantern.
>>>Courtney Eldridge (her book Unkempt, is just out) and Ben Marcus (The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women) conducted this interview in celebration of Marcus’s anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories.
>>>Novelist Percival Everett may shy away from media attention, but this author of more than 15 works of well-received fiction has a hard-earned reputation for the integrity and honesty of his writing—not to mention his stylistic range.
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Francisco Goldman’s third novel, The Divine Husband, a tale of epic love in the U.S. and Latin America (forthcoming from Grove in August), revolves around José Martí, the august poet, essayist, journalist, orator and Cuban revolutionary.
>>>In 1970, with From a Crooked Rib, Nuruddin Farah became the first Somali novelist, and with his second book, A Naked Needle, he caught the unfriendly eye of Somalia’s dictator and was exiled for more than 20 years.
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Mexican-born writer and translator Alma Guillermoprieto has focused on Latin America’s transition into modernity for the last 20 years. In her fourth book, ??Dancing with Cuba??—her first in Spanish—she turns to her own transition from dancer to writer.
>>>Jorge Volpi’ s novel In Search of Klingsor, the first volume in a planned trilogy, is a historical fiction set among the foremost minds of the twentieth century in the U.S. and postwar Germany.
>>>The distinctive language and structure of Erna Brodber’s novels comes as much from James Joyce’s Ulysses as from the polyphonic vernacular of her native Jamaica. Keshia Abraham queries the author on her excavation of forgotten histories.
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Set in Egypt, Rikki Ducornet’s latest novel, Gazelle, revolves around sensuality and sexuality, war games and chess, and the ancient sciences of perfumery and mummification. Thrilling but not a thriller, it is a literary conjugation of pleasure and lo
>>>Novelist Patrick McGrath and actress/director Maria Aitken take a frolicking and incisive ramble with Edward St. Aubyn through his latest literary coup, Some Hope.
>>>Poet and social activist Jimmy Santiago Baca is best known for his memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, and his poetry collection Earthquakes: Poems. This past fall, he came out with a book of poetry, C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans.
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In Aryeh Lev Stollman’s collection of short stories, The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, the author transposes the miracles of modern science with those of the Old Testament, filtering studies on time, entropy and chaos theory through the little miracl
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Steven Millhauser’s first book, Edwin Mullhouse, set the literary world ablaze with admiration, instantly placing him in the most revered of pantheons, that of the writer’s writer. Nine books later his magical illuminations still captivate the reader.
>>>Marie Ponsot’s first book of poems, True Minds, was published as part of the legendary City Lights poetry series in 1957. Despite her association with the Beat poets, Ponsot’s strongly individualist voice and construction of verse defy categorization.
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