Wendy Wasserstein has been among our chief theatrical witnesses, capturing the essential elements of contemporary women’s lives, infusing them with a decidedly female sensibility and returning them to us as theater.

Set in the straitlaced and gossipy Hong Kong of the early ’60s, In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai’s latest masterpiece of suave innuendo stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as two married neighbors who share a contagious secret.

With his new film Kippur, eminent Israeli director Amos Gitai plunges into the chaos of war, its exhausting senselessness, its rupture.

My mind reeling after reading Eduard Galeano’s new volume Upside Down, I prepared a questionnaire of 23 topics that I wanted to discuss with him. Nervous to be interviewing a man whose audacious thinking dazzles like fireworks, I went to meet the Uruguayan author at the hotel where he was staying during his recent visit to Manhattan.

That far downtown, the Hudson can smell leaf green and has an oceanic glint. Overlooking freshets and container ships, the retired Explorer occupies steep rooms in a building where Thomas Edison invented the rotary telephone.

Michael Goldberg (1924–2007) was BOMB’s most knowledgeable and discerning editor, one of America’s greatest painters, and one of our very dearest friends.

Andrea Zittel utilizes design as a tool with larger-than-life goals that merge fantasy, biology, and the built world to produce such projects as curvilinear “escape vehicles.” She currently has a piece on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The work of John Torreano is inspired by experiences of the American ’60s and ’70s. His early works consist of nudes, in a Pop sort of way. 

Thinking of Oaxaca can throw me into the months D. H. Lawrence lived and worked here.

These miniature sculptures have the look of prehistoric plumbing devices, they’re so low technology.

This First Proof contains an excerpt from Incidents of Travel in Riversford.

This First Proof contains the poems “Luna Moth” and “Beatitudes.”

This First Proof contains an excerpt from A Fifth of November.

This First Proof contains the story “The Dead Man.”

This First Proof contains the story “Preservation.”

This First Proof contains the poem “Sitting Vigil.” 

This First Proof contains an excerpt from Housebroken. Translated by Dalya Bilu.

This First Proof contains the poems “Foreign Body” and “Species Fever.”

The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions comprises seven hours and 95 tracks, while The Complete Vee Jay Lee Morgan-Wayne Shorter Sessions racks up 77 cuts for six hours of dream jazz. 

I used to believe that when Tom Cora played the cello he channeled the voices of the dead. 

In the tradition of Gertrude Stein’s response to Cubism and Frank O’Hara’s involvement with painters such as Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter, Marjorie Welish’s poetics offer an interesting analogue to the visual art she has chronicled as a critic. 

The artist as romantic outsider has been a staple of the popular imagination for much of the 20th-century. Debora Silverman’s new book, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art puts into context these well known 19th-century artists, while restoring a sense of dignity to their individual pursuits.

William Tester’s new story collection Head reads like a loose thread you keep pulling from your shirt with the sinking sense you’ll never be able to fix what you’re undoing—all the while keenly aware that you cannot, for your life, stop unraveling.

In his recently published poetry collection The Way Back, Wyn Cooper has assembled a full-blown chorus of beautiful losers, their voices profoundly anchored in enough wistfulness and borderline regret to make for an unexpected dignity. (His poem “Fun” provided the lyrics for Sheryl Crow’s Grammy Award-winning hit “All I Wanna Do.”) “Guys with names like 8-ball” live in these poems. 

“I’m interested in the tangled web of history, in the rough edges, and the bumpy surface, the mess just beneath the veneer of order,” says Carrie Mae Weems. In her newest photographic installation, The Hampton Project, a commission by Williams College, Weems was asked to respond to a collection of archival photographs taken of students from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a renowned, historically African and Native American academic institution.

When I first saw David Lynch’s Lost Highway upon its theater release in 1998, I found myself seduced by what have become classic Lynchean touches: the opening sequence of bifurcated highway strip, its noirish titles, its lushly choreographed scenes and hearty use of the sexual and the grotesque—in sum, its unimpeachable stylishness. 

The Neuberger Museum of Art is immediately memorable, if for no other reason than the galleries are singularly broad and deep: proportion and scale of this acclaimed modernist space are eloquent, not overbearing. 

BOMB’s twenty. What started as a late-night discussion around a kitchen table about what it’s really like to make art has become a magazine known for its intimate conversations between peers—artists, writers, playwrights, directors, composers, actors and architects—about art and life.