Literature
Stories full of weird.
The novelist on writing multiple women’s voices, creating a world where men are toxic, and the wide range of female dystopian fiction.
Out, like fireflies, from the inter-dimensional, / silver disks at edge of picture hover over Hillary / with swaddled child, John Podesta counterpose beside her, / in a painting I’d like to paint, had I been a painter, / trading in detail from the too-smooth desert
The writer on kill bro poems, cyborg transformations as erotic experiences, and implicating the self.
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.
For Marwa Helal and me, the histories of our two countries—Egypt and Sudan—are inextricably linked, our shared Nile both the most obvious and fertile metaphor.
a surgeon takes / a shirt off. / a struggle. / a shrug. / a shrinking / blinking quiet. / give him his bottle / so he can suck on it.
Featuring selections by Tom Comitta, Molly Crabapple, Veronica Scott Esposito, Carlos Fonseca, and more.
The novelist on living in liminal spaces, Los Angeles in the `90s, and using Ponyboy as inspiration.
The portrait photographer on how he captures the spirit and power of a writer’s work.
A car wrote a book worth reading.
The writer on working in the porn industry, the theatricality of violence, and the mundanity of capitalism.
The biographer on writing about a complicated artist, with a peopled life.
A superabundant life online, thinking through networks, and asking for more.
The internet does a better job of documenting / the way we feel when something soft, especially / a mammal, is very cute, than poetry does.
yours in torchlight / we audit our equipment / note how few genuine distractions / present as distraction first
Winner of BOMB’s 2018 Poetry Contest, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin.
Yavush dressed like a girl who didn’t really love herself—in short, strappy dresses that flashed meaty upper thigh, with a clip-on swoop bang and acrylic fingernails that curved into the future, dripping rhinestones, gold hearts, and glitter.
You are a color-blind social worker in a small town and your secret is you stopped giving a fuck. A man you loved more than you knew was possible has left you, but so what, right?
In echoes and splices of “narrative sonic bites,” Douglas sets her experimental novel, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, to the dub pulse of Rasta tradition.
