Mysterious as it is confrontational, Mona Hatoum’s art reads far beyond the realm of identity politics. Fellow artist Janine Antoni explores the complexities of Hatoum’s work and background.

Shot on location in Mexico in Spanish and a variety of Indian dialects, John Sayles’s film Hombres Armados (Men with Guns) is in many ways a truly foreign film. David L. Ulin talks with Sayles about how the film reflects the cultures it portrays.

This interview is featured, along with 34 others, in our anthology BOMB: The Author Interviews.

Drawing from the bric-à-brac of history, in this case anecdotes and paradoxes from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William James, and Gertrude Stein, novelist Maureen Howard plays with, and reinvents, the novel as form.

Steve Earle’s get-down, down-home sounds cross the line from Rock to Country, and his album Washington Square Serenade, snagged a Grammy in 2008. In this 1998 interview, David Gates finds a man as complex and concise as his music.

Fairy tales do come true if playwright Martin McDonagh’s meteoric rise in London, with four productions staged in the same season, is any indication. His plays are Irish tales told with all the violence, humor and magic of a banshee.

Who has a better sense of irony and humor, English or American actors? Victor Garber and Alfred Molina give us an inside view of Yasmina Reza’s play Art and compare notes on how two guys from either side of the Atlantic pursue art in the theater.

Influenced by fly-on-the-wall documentaries of the ’70s, Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing has turned the form on its ear: recording her subjects’ confessions, then re-pairing sound and image, mixing the voices of adults, children and relatives.

Inside Billy Copley’s subconscious, cartoon characters, declarative statements, and phonetic alphabets battle for attention.

David Clarkson is an abstract painter but not a purist. He is part of a new breed of painters who no longer hold painting in esteem.

Sarah Sze pulled back the skin of a wall at PS1 and ripped out its guts. She created a pulsing, dripping universe precariously holding onto life like a dissected frog. 

Who is that child forced to dance through streamers and confetti and alcohol on a table for Kennedy half dollars?

Rosa strode down Swerve Street, dragging her nails along the wall. Sparks leapt and underscored a graffiti saying, ONLY THE EXPERT WILL REALISE YOUR EXAGGERATIONS ARE TRUE.

I remember sitting in the basement of the Whitney Museum a few years back, thinking it was a weird place for an event featuring the funky bards of the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe. 

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

This remarkable collection of stories spans the full breadth of a century of Cuban short story writing.

From Moby Dick to Gravity’s Rainbow America has glimpsed the rare encyclopedic novel. But Luc Sante’s The Factory of Facts may be the first encyclopedic memoir, at once comprehensive and personal, erudite and intuitive. 

In “Multiplicity,” his last memo for the next millennium, Italo Calvino gives us a template for the encyclopedic novel: expansive, playful, difficult—successful metafiction.

Amistad, an opera commissioned by Philadelphia and Chicago, is not merely a musical remake of the film but a complex and conundrum-filled version of a tragic event.

If, according to the Peter Principle, every corporate employee rises to his or her level of incompetence, isn’t it possible that this applies to machines as well?

One night Lex Braes came to a party in my loft, a bit of boisterous dance music, a dram or two of whisky, and a chance encounter with a fellow Scotsman were enough to send Braes into a rollicking frenzy of delight. 

James Sheehan’s first solo show is of large-doings scaled down to our size—then smaller.

In his book, Prisoners, Svenson has adopted a group of forgotten children; mug shot negatives which he found, developed, and brought back from the dead.

When Carrie Yamaoka makes her mirrorlike paintings she simultaneously gives up control and seizes it. 

With a Jungian insistence, psychic activity punches its way into consciousness via Elliott Green’s latest paintings.

Rose Nolan makes two things, both of which recall Constructivism: banners bearing Cyrillic initials, underscoring their art historical provenance but replacing a collective referent with a personal one; and constructions, made out of cardboard and tape, which have a distinctly Tatlinish look. 

Two recent exceptions that have revitalized my faith in the possibilities inherent in Pop music are Radiohead’s remarkable OK Computer and Bob Dylan’s wonderful Time Out Of Mind: two records that couldn’t be more different and yet more in sync.

While others of Rufus Wainwright’s generation combine old beats with the help of new technology, this 23-year-old singer/songwriter does the same, only with a grand piano

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.