BOMB 123/Spring 2013
Novelist Caryl Phillips and the great theoretician Stuart Hall discuss cultural studies and the Caribbean diaspora.
Actor Willem Dafoe and Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje discuss The English Patient’s transformation from novel to film.
In his much awaited first book, The Women, Hilton Als spans autobiography, cultural theory and nonfiction essay. Artist Coco Fusco gets “the James Baldwin of the 21st century” to talk about confronting the silence.
Write me an interview: Novelists Donald Antrim and Thomas Bolt trade keys to iconoclasm and metaphor in Antrim’s novel, The Hundred Brothers.
A.M. Homes speaks to the master storyteller of This Boy’s Life, In Pharaoh’s Army and a book of stories, The Night in Question.
Suzannah Lessard’s rumination, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, and Honor Moore’s biography of her grandmother, The White Blackbird, reveal the myths and truths surrounding family legacies.
Sapphire’s a literary phenomenon. Kelvin Christopher James goes in depth with her first novel, Push in this 1996 interview. Precious, the film adaptation of Push, is in theaters now.
Philosopher Nick Pappas and painter Katy Martin, who has currently entered the foray of film, discuss Plato’s challenge to poetry and examine conceptions of the idiosyncratic and the subjective.
After an eight year hiatus, the Zen Amsterdam cop returns in van de Wetering’s The Hollow-Eyed Angel. Painter and writer Stanley Moss talks to the former monk/patrolman about the unconventional crime and the unconventional solution.
Irvine Welsh has been coined as the acid house badboy of Scotland. He also happens to write like a sonovabitch, a term he’d appreciate. Writer Jenifer Berman and Welsh discuss class allegiance, class betrayal, and “trainspotting” among the muckers.
Padgett Powell is one of the funniest men alive. If he weren’t such a great writer — Edisto, Edisto Revisited — he could always be a comedian. V. Hunt tracks the laughs.
Set against Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, A.M. Homes and artist Gregory Crewdson scrape the layers off suburban homes, revealing the surreal, the pornographic, and the psycho-sexual desires in her novel, The End of Alice.
Writer Amy Hempel speaks with Sharon Olds, heir to Lowell, Plath and Sexton, about loyalty and betrayal. Olds was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Polito, author of Savage Art, a biography on Jim Thompson, talks to Peter Carey, author of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, about the push and pull of home, politics and alienation.
Novelist Carole Maso unearths the darkness in the dizzying poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, collected in her 1995 book, a seven year project inspired by Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters.
Earthquake! June Jordan, the award-winning author of 21 books, tells Josh Kuhn about her operatic collaborations and her libretto for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
Russell Banks reveals the dark side of the American spirit in his novel, Rule of the Bone, with Pinckney Benedict, winner of the John Steinbeck Award for Dogs of God.
Jenifer Berman and poet Patricia Spears Jones (who was just awarded the Oscar Williams-Gene Derwood Award of the New York Community Trusttalk) about the various facets of Jones’s writing and her views on religion, race and privacy.
Luminary William H. Gass speaks about his recently published epic The Tunnel, which took 26 years to complete.
What took three nights to write and five years to prepare for, Li-Young Lee’s memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance takes poetic thought and language to a whole new level.
Bradford Morrow discusses his novel, Trinity Fields, growing up in the post-atomic era, and the themes of life and death in Los Alamos.
Sigrid Nunez and Kimiko Hahn reflect upon Nunez’s novel A Feather on the Breath of God, discussing the concepts of woman as storyteller, and writing as crochet.
Writer Ariel Dorfman addresses his pan-American past, the threshold of insanity, and the literary stakes of exile.
A conversation between Caryl Phillips and prolific author, past MacArthur Fellow and PEN Faulkner Award-winner John Edgar Wideman, recorded for a live audience at Woottons Bookshop in Amherst, Massachusetts on March 29, 1994.
A.M. Homes explores the many elements of Jayne Anne Phillips’s novel, Shelter in this 1994 interview. Her novel, Lark and Termite, has been nominated for the 2009 National Book Award for fiction.
Award-winning novelist Rick Moody talks about his novel The Ice Storm which documents 24 hours in the life of the Hoods in 1973. He and Jill Eisenstadt discuss family and the darker consequences of the early ‘70s “sexual revolution.”
Dennis Cooper’s mix of earnesty and violence have made his work timelessly hip and readable. He speaks with Benjamin Weissman after the release of Try, his third installment in The George Miles cycle.
An in-depth interview with “one of America’s most indispensable and independent thinkers,” bell hooks, by BOMB contributing editor Lawrence Chua.
Paul Beatty, acclaimed and inventive author, speaks with poet, critic, and gallery owner Christian Haye on issues of personal politics, performance, group-think, and getting by with style in the world of contemporary poetry.
A short story, titled “Footnotes,” by Klaus Kertess.
