WEB EXCLUSIVE Harvey Shapiro is one of New York’s major 20th-century literary figures. A poet and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, he continues writing at 86. Here he reveals why a New York poet constantly works with found material.
WEB EXCLUSIVE When sound installation artist Margaret de Wys was diagnosed with breast cancer, she left all she had established to be healed by a shaman in the Ecuadorian jungle … and it worked. Her new book, Black Smoke, describes how.
En Español Francisco Suniaga y Federico Vegas, dos destacados novelistas venezolanos, hablan de los personajes trágicos y legendarios de la historia venezolana que habitan sus ficciones.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Francisco Suniaga and Federico Vegas, two of Venezuela’s most celebrated novelists, discuss those tragic and legendary characters of Venezuela’s history inhabiting their fiction. Also available in Spanish.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Shortlisted for a National Book Award for her poetry book Or To Begin Again, Ann Lauterbach discusses the function of the undead in her work and explains the art of the “imagined community.”
WEB EXCLUSIVE Read “The Forecast,” an excerpt from The Real Illusion: Twenty-One Stories by Simon Lane, illustrated by Tunga.
WEB EXCLUSIVE! In this epistolary exchange, novelists Nathan Englander and Rivka Galchen discuss the art of writing, pop culture, the Argentina of the Dirty Wars, the Jewish Diaspora, and the imagination.
WEB EXCLUSIVE! Weeks before the end of Simic’s Laureate run, he and fellow poet Tomaž Šalamun caught up with each other over the phone. Read their exchange now!
BOMB and Park Lit joined forces on July 17, 2008 for a reading in NYC’s Tompkins Square Park. Listen to audio clips of readings by literary contributors to our Summer 2008 issue, BOMB 104.
WEB EXCLUSIVE! A National Book Award finalist for his most recent novel The Lazarus Project, Sarajevo-born, Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon mines the condition of living in exile and of being grotesquely pinned between past and present.
Part 2 of 2! Musician turned musicologist Ned Sublette unravels the histories and sounds that shaped New Orleans, our most “American” city. Click here to read Part 1 of the interview!
Part 1 of 2! Musician turned musicologist Ned Sublette unravels the histories and sounds that shaped New Orleans, our most “American” city. Out now: The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
Listen to audio clips of readings from BOMB’s 100th Issue Reading on August 1, 2007 at Park Lit in Tompkins Square Park, featuring literary contributors to our Summer 2007 issue, BOMB #100.
Listen to audio clips of readings from BOMB’s All-Stars Reading on May 12, 2006 at The New School, featuring a literary line-up of contributors to our Spring 2006 “Living Legends” 25th Anniversary issue.
Gabriela Jauregui talks with Daniel Alarcón and Alex Espinoza, born in Lima and Tijuana, respectively, about how their daring recent novels cross the language barrier, the history/fiction divide, and Icarus’s fall.
Paternostro calls Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? “a surreal and very dark labyrinth.” Her book, My Colombian War, exposes a different side of the Latin American puzzle.
En Español La distinguida autora venezolana se formó profesionalmente como psicoanalista. Con la novelista Carmen Boullosa, habla sobre las herramientas principales tanto del psicoanálisis como del quehacer narrativo: la memoria y el saber escuchar.
The novelist’s latest, The Informers, tells untold tales. One is the story of Colombia’s German and Jewish émigrés on the eve of and aftermath of World War II. Paternostro and Vásquez hash out this and other dark chapters in Colombia’s history.
Torres, one of Venezuela’s most respected authors and essayists, began her professional life as a psychoanalyst. With fellow novelist Boullosa, she discusses the roles of memory and listening, tools of both trades, in her writing.
En Español Lea “Miedo”, un microcuento de Evelio Rosero.
En Español El autor colombiano de Los ejércitos asevera que “esa locura, ese filo de la navaja donde transcurre la realidad y la irrealidad, están aquí, respiran a cada vuelta de esquina, y son los que impulsan mi escritura.”
Evelio Rosero, the Colombian author of The Armies, says of his art: “This madness, this knife’s edge where reality and unreality take place, are here; they breathe around every street corner, and they are what propel my writing.”
Lydia Peelle was just honored with the “5 Under 35” Award by the National Book Foundation. Read her interview, then listen to a recording of her reading from her collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.
Filmmaker Taylor delves into Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, where the preconceptions of human nature are exposed and the triumphs of civil society are extolled.
D’Ambrosio wrote of Nam Le’s prize-winning story collection, The Boat, “This book journeys across time and space, history and continents.” The authors roam across the literary terrain of Hemingway, Greene, and an asymptotic ocean.
In The Loop, his most recent novel in English, Roubaud probes the precision of his memories with mathematical zeal. He generously reminisces here—on his involvement with Oulipo, and much more.
FICTION FOR DRIVING ACROSS AMERICA This is the unabridged version of Ben Ehrenreich’s story. You can download a podcast of him reading the story at bombsiteblog.com
Kraft’s new novel, Flying, tells the hilarious and digressive story of Peter Leroy, “birdboy of Babbington,” who as a teenager assembled an aerocycle in his garage. The authors on the Peter Leroy cycle. Alfred Jarry, and Twain’s Hucklberry Finn.