As artists, we have to find the antidote to this darkness right now, to how everything feels so compressed rather than expanded.
—
Meredith Monk
Morning Exercise by Robert Lopez
- Yusef Komunyakaa by Paul Muldoon
- Ian McKellen by Scott Mendelsohn
- Sam Taylor-Wood by Bruce Ferguson
- Thomas Nozkowski by Francine Prose
- Alexander Nehamas by David Carrier
- Geoffrey O’Brien by Luc Sante
- Mark Richard by J.D. Dolan
Interviews
- Clifford Ross by Betsy Sussler
- Y.Z. Kami by Goran Tomcic
- Tall Kafka and His Sisters by Cynthia Ozick
Artists on Artists
- At Night by David Ryan
- Two Poems by Elisa Albo
- Sympathy by Jim Thompson
- Under The House by Lynn Freed
- F-105 Over Red River by Neal Durando
- Rita McBride by Mimi Thompson
- Morning Exercise by Robert Lopez
- Disguise by Sheila Kohler
- Leadership by Terese Svoboda
- Two Poems by Tom Sleigh
First Proof
- Jane Kaplowitz by Judith Hudson
- Kathy O’Dell’s Contract With the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s by Coco Fusco
- Cynthia Lovett by Calvin Reid
- Amelia Jones’s Body Art/Performing the Subject by Saul Ostrow
- Veda Hille’s Spine by Emily Plemons
- Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Gary Fisketjon
- Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus by Betsy Sussler
- Yoel Hoffmann’s Bernard, Katschen & The Book of Joseph by Minna Proctor
- Peter Nádas’s A Book of Memories, translated by Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein by Deborah Eisenberg
- James Purdy’s Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue by Linda Yablonsky
- Fernando Pessoa by Robert Polito
- Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (La Vitá é Bella) by Minna Proctor
- Jim Grimsley’s Mr. Universe and Other Plays by Nelson Taylor
- Tom Butter by Mark Magill
- John Maybury’s Love is the Devil by Lawrence Chua
Editor's Choice
In the third grade our teacher Miss Cansino who was something of a psychic herself, had all the third graders write down a secret word on an index card at the beginning of the last day of class. At the end of the day she had each student read his or her secret word. Eighteen of Miss Cansino’s 22 students had the same word written down. The other four were: window, baseball, transfusion and flabbergasted.
—Robert Lopez is a writer living in New York.
Related
Stories full of weird.
A pose recurs in Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come From the Sea: one character after another finds themselves on their knees, waiting. For the dawn, for mercy, for love.
Stories that magnify what it means to be black in America through a satirical, uncanny lens.
Originally published in
BOMB 65,
Fall 1998
Featuring interviews with Yusef Komunyakaa & Paul Muldoon, Ian McKellen, Sam Taylor-Wood, Thomas Nozkowski, Geoffrey O’Brien, Alexander Nehamas, and Mark Richard.
