In the first installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Peter Orner reads his short story “Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove,” published in BOMB 103’s literary supplement, First Proof.
Part of the Fiction for Driving series.
Two decades after it happened Herb Swanson began to tell it at dinner parties.
When I was thirteen, two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the house to follow up on a conversation from the week before with my mother.
The playwright discusses his formative years, rejuvenation of historical material, and how race is coded into theatergoing itself.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Joseph Bartscherer, Steve DiBenedetto, Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet, Zachary Lazar, Harmony Korine, Tav Falco, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
