BOMB 113/Fall 2010
Bad Behavior, Gaitskill’s literary debut, confronts taboos in 1980s New York City with both wit and precision. She discusses the collection and some of the taboos with artist and writer Stephen Westfall.
Fay Weldon believes that virtue makes boring fiction. As a result, her deliciously evil characters have brought her literary talents to both stage and screen.
Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Swift discuss memory, identity, and Ishiguro’s critically acclaimed novel The Remains of the Day.
Deborah Eisenberg was just awarded a McArthur grant. In this ‘89 interview, she discusses running away from college, Latin America, and replacing the word processor with a stone tablet and an axe.
Sometimes being an outsider gives the best view of the inside. Bharati Mukherjee writes from her own experiences and obsessions in effect revisioning the American mind.
Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow discusses Gothic writing past and present with novelist Patrick McGrath shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Grotesque.
Writer Gary Indiana discusses his first novel Horse Crazy, in which an anonymous narrator details his tumultuous love affair with the beautiful, sociopathic, drug-addled, HIV-positive man with whom he is obsessed.
From her home in rural Pennsylvania, Bobbie Ann Mason examines life in her native Kentucky, writing about homespun characters whose lives are spinning after being cut loose from all sense of home.
Despite death threats and religious edict, subversive novelist and essayist Salman Rushdie has won numerous awards and remains a prominent voice in global politics.
Bored? Try picking up Dennis Cooper’s Closer in which he explores seeking transcendence in spite of impending bleakness and boredom.
Self-proclaimed “martyr to fiction” Peter Ackroyd gushes about his terminal Anglophilia.
Harry Mathews has covered the literary terrain: short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, translator and editor. He speaks with Lynne Tillman about his books, Cigarettes, 20 Lines A Day, and The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec.
Patrick McGrath discusses Graham Swift’s novel Out of This World, which was published by Poseidon Press in the Fall of 1989.
Of Frederic Tuten’s novel, Tallien: A Brief Romance, Susan Sontag wrote “Tallien is a wonderfully high-flying tale of two woes, made out of juicy just-right sentences [...] unforgettable.” Tuten speaks with writer and editor Bruce Wolmer.
German novelist Gregor Von Rezzori on his masterpiece, The Death of My Brother Abel, the decline of postwar Europe, and the insurmountable influence of Nabokov.
Celebrated poet and author Paul Auster moves between forms and genres, creating ambitious works of literature. He speaks with writer Joseph Mallia on the necessities of writing and their impact on the reader.
Novelist Nancy Lemann crafts languorous Louisiana dramas in her two books, Lives of the Saints, and The Ritz of the Bayou. Here, she discusses being a Jew in the south, the future of her characters, and the lingering memory of the Civil War.
Novelist Julian Barnes on sex, Flaubert, and being obsessed with obsessions.
Though he is anxious to shirk the labels bestowed upon him by critics and fans alike, Steve Erickson’s surreal prose has been compared to the work of Pynchon and Márquez. He talks to James Mx Lane after the publication of his novel Rubicon Beach.
Mona Simpson’s new novel, My Hollywood, comes out from Knopf on 8/3. In this 1987 interview, the young writer discusses her first novel with Ameena Meer.
Janet Hobhouse discusses her various books with Bruce Wolmer — November, Dancing in the Dark and Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein — and the differences between “American” and “English” writing.
Authors Martin Amis and Patrick McGrath discuss Amis’s novel, Money, a black comedy set in New York and London, featuring the misadventures of a large and ugly filmmaker named John Self, a man “addicted to the 20th century.”
Famed writer, editor, filmmaker, and publisher Charles Henri Ford speaks of his early years in Paris, his theory of collage, and how he came to obtain a nude photograph of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.
British novelist and short story writer Angela Carter talks to Rosemary Carroll about The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s film adaptation of her short story.
Waterland, first published In England in 1983, established Graham Swift as one of the more original, elegant, and imaginatively fertile of the younger English writers. Patrick McGrath talks to him about his work in a cold house off the Fulham Road.
Glenn O’Brien provides the anti-treatise for the post-surrealist conception of the world: the Subrealist Manifesto.
Poet and translator Edouard Roditi (1910–1992) speaks with writer Bradford Morrow about his autobiographical projects and his role in the Surrealist Movement.
In an unorthodox interview with TV writer and producer Mark Magill, novelist and feminist critic Kathy Acker talks about marriage, sex, God, the Thirteenth Amendment, and baseball.
Novelist, translator and editor Paul Bowles tells David Seidner about his literary career and life, spanning the greater part of the 20th century: working with Tennessee Williams, moments with Gertrude Stein, and a distaste for Wagner.
