Tag Archives: Books

Literature Takeover at BOMBsite

Ann Lauterbach. Photo by Eve Thoreau.
With the National Book Awards ceremony approaching this Wednesday, we’ve filled our homepage with nominees and winners of the prestigious awards throughout the decades. Head over to our site for interviews with Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, and a brand new Web Exclusive interview with 2009 National Book Award for Poetry nominee Ann Lauterbach.

Ten More Years

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Yes, Williamsburg—especially Bedford Avenue—has become a tangle of overpriced boutiques, overcrowded brunch spots, and ghastly shells of half-built condos, but there are still a few establishments that make me not want to throw up my hands and move from my shoddy Lorimer St. digs to Red Hook.

Holly Goddard Jones: More than Girl Trouble

Holly Goddard Jones. Image courtesy HarperCollins.
While the words girl trouble may conjure up images of teenaged girls talking on the phone about boys, please read further. Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection Girl Trouble offers intimate character portrayals set in Roma, Kentucky. From unexpected pregnancy to murder, the characters find themselves in desperate situations which often render them helpless.

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhari. Photo by Eamonn McCabe. Courtesy Knopf.
“My interest in the English language is not just to do with a relationship with empire,” says novelist Amit Chaudhuri. At least, not the British Empire. For him, Indians have to contend with an empire of a different (although not unrelated) kind: their own.

Joanna Howard’s ON THE WINDING STAIR

Courtesy BOA Editions. Joanna Howard’s dizzying tales of drowned sailors, glowing specters, reclusive dandies, and roguish pursuers start like the strike of a match: they ignite in an instant to a dazzling flame and then just as suddenly die out.

On the New Russian Realism: Questions for the Editors of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

rasskazyFew countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has, so it’s easy to assume that with each geopolitical quake the country’s cultural continuity gets split along the resulting fault lines. But if one looks closer at contemporary Russian literature, there are more convergences than divergences with the country’s heritage. The stories in Tin House Books’ Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia offer 23 depictions of the so-called new Russia from some of its most talented young writers.

Jonathan Lethem and Betsy Sussler in Conversation

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Jonathan Lethem’s new book, Chronic City, is out now from Doubleday. He discusses the naming of characters in this clip from a conversation with BOMB Editor-in-Chief Betsy Sussler. Head over to BOMBsite for the full interview.

A Maryland Oresteia: Michael Mewshaw’s LYING WITH THE DEAD

Other Press.
A throwback to the great Faulknerian family sagas, Lying with the Dead is populated by characters obsessed with the traumas lurking in their pasts.

Stephen Elliott

Stephen Elliott. Photo by Katherine Emery.
The Adderall Diaries, a nonfiction work written by Stephen Elliott and out this month, is not a book about Adderall. And though Elliott’s intent was to focus on the murder trial of Hans Reiser, It really isn’t even a book about murder. While the trial lends The Adderall Diaries a focused storyline, the more intriguing parts focus on Elliott himself, as he attempts to piece together his past and his uncertain future.

SAVAGE by Jacques Jouet

Courtesy Dalkey Archive Press.
“What, at this point in time, can we make of a man,” the narrator of Jacques Jouet’s most recent novella, Savage, asks himself.

Ian MacKenzie

Photo by Samantha Holmes. Courtesy Penguin Group.

Susan Y. Chi talks to Ian MacKenzie about his debut novel, City of Strangers.

Little Fingers by Filip Florian

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Little Fingers by Filip Florian is a “novel about a little town and a big discovery.” In present-day Romania, a mass grave, “a torrent of human bones that had not fallen from the heavens like rain, but emerged from the earth near a subsided wall,” is happened upon.

BOMB’s Park Lit Reading 2009

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Thanks to everyone who came out to BOMB’s Park Lit reading in Tompkins Square Park last Wednesday. Perfect weather and a dynamic group of readers made for a fun evening in the park (minus the annoying teenager strumming his guitar in the background, but we’ll write that off as Tompkins Square charm). We have a video recap for you after the jump.

Michael Idov

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Michael Idov has accomplished three things I have, at some point in my life, wanted to do: he is a features writer at New York Magazine, he wrote a book, and he opened a coffee house on the Lower East Side.