American Dream
A posthumous collection cements the author’s reputation as a master of the short story.
Historical analogies between the Civil War period and our own time are plentiful in a conversation about the author’s much-anticipated first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
Nicotine, the author’s third novel in as many years, dives into the world of East Coast anarchists.
“I think violence is inherited, it’s taught, and some of the characters are born into bad blood. …The characters are raped and so is the land.”
“I’m glad that the work is still proving elusive enough to resist attempts to gather it all up in a critical hamper or net.”
“Post-love, post-work, post-faith, post-home. What’s left?”
On being an outsider, the nature of authenticity, and the depths of pop-culture.
Nicholas Elliott on George Cukor’s 1938 film Holiday, a subversive classic.
In this multi-part web-exclusive interview for BOMBlog, George Saunders and Patrick Dacey discuss growth as a writer, the place of the writing workshop (including a visit from a drunken Hemingway), and whether a man can ever really experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head.
In this multi-part web-exclusive interview for BOMBlog, George Saunders and Patrick Dacey discuss the writing process, storytelling technique (“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey”), and how the mind is like the trash compactor from Star Wars.
Campbell McGrath’s latest collection, Shannon, is a book-length poetic narrative about George Shannon.
Director Kelly Reichardt first gained widespread notice with her 2006 film Old Joy, a paean to post–9/11 political and personal miasma played out in the campfire conversations and road-trip recollections of two longtime friends in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.
In 1972, the art collective known as Ant Farm constructed a time capsule by filling a refrigerator, which they described as the “open door to the American dream,” with such everyday cultural artifacts as candy bars, magazines, fake eyelashes, and a television.
Jonathan Franzen and I conducted this interview at his dining room table, in his apartment on the Upper East Side, one morning in the early part of summer.
Blanca’s aunt Vera seemed born with money. Her gestures, her voice, her social graces had been so well studied and cultivated that she could have fooled anyone who wasn’t familiar with her past.
Russell Banks reveals the dark side of the American spirit in his novel, Rule of the Bone, with Pinckney Benedict, winner of the John Steinbeck Award for Dogs of God.
Roland Legiardi-Laura invokes documentarian Barbara Kopple’s modesty as they discuss the extreme hardships and tensions involved in making Oscar-winning films such as American Dream and Harlan County, U.S.A.
Rhymes, riddles—children like these.
