Jenifer Berman

This First Proof contains an excerpt from “The Book of John.”

The first time I met Tony Arefin he was gesticulating wildly, his arms swirling like dried leaves in the wind. 

Set in and around his native Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon’s stories struggle with a world abruptly changing, and his characters.

Mark Jude Poirier arrives, kicking up the desert dirt like a pickup spinning donuts on a dehydrated lawn. 

Winner of numerous festival awards, including this year’s Sundance World Premiere and the Berlin Festival’s Ecumenical Prize, Walter Salles’s Central Station is set in the director’s native Brazil. 

It’s hard to like Doug Willis, the slightly smug, spoiled, and self-deprecating narrator of David Gates’s second novel, Preston Fall

Painted sleek and smooth, almost candy-coated in their plastic finish, Bonnie Collura’s sculptures long to be touched. They tempt, like a shiny red apple. 

Referred to by its filmmaker as the “ultimate low-concept movie, a movie without a one sentence description,” Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of four men seemingly obsessed by animals…

A storytelling bowl with the selective ability to change size and shape, to grow eight feet high, to repair itself when shattered, to save its unlucky possessor from harm’s way. 

One part quinine; another obeah magic; finally, scissors.

Twenty-three years and multiple producers later, Gast finally edited his 300,000 feet of film into a taut and stirring 90 minutes, attesting as much to his own tenacity and perseverance as his star’s.

Artist Matthew Ritchie’s “project”—his paintings, sculptures and website—fuses myth, science and a host of funny-headed characters into a brave, new interactive world.

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.

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.

Writer Ariel Dorfman addresses his pan-American past, the threshold of insanity, and the literary stakes of exile.