Matthew Zapruder’s new book, Come On All You Ghosts, does what many great collections of poems do: it expands a reader’s sense of what is possible, both for poetic form and for reality itself. With dynamic, logically complex sentences, Zapruder posits a world that is both extraordinary and refreshingly ordinary.

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Chris Abani’s recently released collection of poems, Sanctificum, creates a space large enough for one man’s personal story, the problems of this world, and the vastness of a greater unknown. Levi Rubeck writes, “I see the work of someone who believes enough to question everything.”

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Alex Ross, music critic, is the author of Listen to This, a collection of essays from The New Yorker. Click through to read an interview with Amy Whipple where Ross discusses the relevance of classical music, Björk, and Aaron Copland’s checking account.

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BOMBlog’s Levi Rubeck delves into this correspondence between the poet Ted Berrigan and his young wife, who had had been committed to a psychiatric ward by her parents after marrying the drug-and-Pepsi-addled beatnik poet.

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Dinaw Mengestu writes stories. Just stories. What’s more, his books—first The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and now How to Read the Air—examine prototypical American desires like success, visibility, and reinvention.

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Wait a minute Mr. Postman! Is there are review in your bag for me? BOMB contributor Jackie Wang kicks off her Epistolary Review series with Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution.

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Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s cult object-book 5 metros de poemas is an excited and sometimes surrealist counter-point to the Latin American poets of his time.

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BOMBlog’s B.C. Edwards reviews a single story from Joe Meno’s collection Demons in Spring.

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Leonora Carrington is considered the last living member of the inner circle of pre-WWII Parisian surrealists. She’s 93 years old. And she’s still alive and creating art in Mexico City.

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Half a Life, a foray into memoir by novelist Darin Strauss, centers on a tragic accident in the author’s life. He discusses memoir, and his decision to explore the subject directly for the first time, in this conversation with Emily Testa.

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In C, his newest novel, Tom McCarthy proposes a state of being that revolves many parts around an unusual temporal whole and, once again, circumvents the conventions of 19th-century realism. Writer David Varno delves in.

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John Reed’s Tales of Woe offers a parade of captivating, affronting stories that challenge and delight—er, disturb—the reader. BOMBlog’s Ben Mirov wades through the tears.

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In Mentor, Tom Grimes explores the cyclical nature of two intertwined lives, two lives bound by literature, and the way in which the vicissitudes of friendship and mentorship can push and pull at the boundaries of our relationships.

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With over a dozen LPs under his belt, Bill Callahan’s voice has taken on some further gravitas, but he sounds spirited as ever. Callahan has just published a book with Drag City—Letters to Emma Bowlcut . I’m not sure if it’s a novella, an epistle, or one hell of a big poem. But questions like that are beside the point.

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Josh has a bunch of degrees. He’s also written a nice stack of books. If you read a poem of his you might agree that there’s something wild-eyed and ghostly about it. His newest collection of verse is called Selenography, about two handfuls of sprawling poems accompanied by the Polaroid photography of Tim Rutili, frontman of the band Califone, and Josh’s friend. Part 2 of a 2 part conversation.

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Josh has a bunch of degrees. He’s also written a nice stack of books. If you read a poem of his you might agree that there’s something wild-eyed and ghostly about it. His newest collection of verse is called Selenography, about two handfuls of sprawling poems accompanied by the Polaroid photography of Tim Rutili, frontman of the band Califone, and Josh’s friend. Part 1 of a 2 part conversation.

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The stories of Tiphanie Yanique’s debut collection How To Escape From A Leper Colony hold no fear. Centered on life in the US Virgin Islands, they seem ready for the generic lexicon of lazy reviewers. BOMBlog’s intrepid Jack Palmer spoke with Yanique about the fallacy of that vocabulary and the lessons available in literature.

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Jennifer Vanderbes is the kind of writer who makes the project of writing a novel seem like the noblest pursuit in the universe. The worlds she creates, both in 2003’s Easter Island and this month’s Strangers at the Feast, feel fully contemplated, completely explored, as though she would know anything you dared to ask about them, no matter how trivial. BOMBlog’s Emily Testa speaks to her about authenticity and adultery—specifically, how fiction needs more of one and a whole lot less of the other.

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Nearly 30 years on from his masterpiece The Gift, author Lewis Hyde turns in his sharp new book, Common As Air , a lively commentary on the present state of copyright and the public domain in America. BOMBlog’s Chris Wallace spoke with Hyde about information, art and the ownership of the intangible.

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Emma Rathbone’s debut novel, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, explores male teenage angst, conveying not only a palpable sense of frustration, anger, and apathy, but also the odd humor and stumbling insights, that can accompany the pain of maturation. Jack Palmer talks with the author about how she arrived at Juvie with a pissed-off protagonist, and, like, found his voice, and stuff.

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Under a range of settings and circumstances, Marisa Silver’s characters are all grappling with how to be close to a lover, a parent, a child—accepting the obstacles and unpleasant emotions that come along with intimacy. Silver’s prose is gracefully simple, and its subtlety contrasts the complicated and abstract issues her stories explore. Risa Kahn speaks with the author about the themes of her new short story collection Alone With You —optimism, contradiction, love, and what it means to be close with someone.

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Lauren Elkin chronicles the rock and roll bird-watching and Hermes scarf-tying at the least muddy festival in Britain. Complete with drawings by Joanna Walsh, aka Badaude.

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Powered by the refrain-directive “write,” and “cross out,” the content of poet and collage artist Lucy Ives’ most recent work, Anamnesis, remains under active, sustained deliberation throughout. BOMBlog’s Claire Wilcox emailed with Ives, discussing practice, poetry, and power of fortuitous error.

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Robin Black’s debut story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This , is chock-full of impeccable examples of how and why the American Short Story remains a vibrant, meaningful genre. BOMBlog’s B.C. Edwards asks about the how and the why of first-time publication, readers’ approach to the short story, and inevitability of negative feedback.

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Paul Killebrew’s debut collection of poems, Flowers, is excitingly fresh, mining a strong vein of modern American poetry with a deft touch. BOMBlog’s Jack Palmer talks to the poet about form, simplicity and the poetics of tax law.

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Guillevic’s Geometries, deftly “Englished,” by the venerable Richard Sieburth is out now as part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s Lost Literature series. BOMBlog’s Levi Rubeck squares the circle.

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It was with reluctance that Shane Jones initially submitted his novel, Light Boxes, to Adam Robinson, Founding Editor of the small press Publishing Genius, who accepted his submission with equal reluctance. Now, after being optioned (and subsequently turned down) by Spike Jonze, Light Boxes has been re-released by Penguin. Featuring a recording of him reading from the novel at McNally Jackson in Manhattan.

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Gordon Lish has loomed large in the background of the American short story for nearly half a century. His recent Collected Fictions provides a re-affirmation of his incredible influence on a form he so clearly treasures. BOMBlog’s B.C. Edwards spoke with Lish over the phone about revision, reduction and the silence that precedes reading.

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Nic Brown is the author of 2009’s Floodmarkers and now Doubles, a novel about a lapsed tennis player with unrealized dreams and a wife in a coma. The author spoke with BOMBlog’s Emily Testa about research, real-life characters, and writing the South.

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Somewhere between art book and poetry opus, Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity fills a void that may well represent the future-space of new writing. BOMBlog’s Ben Mirov picks his brain.

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