
History

The anonymous industrial music duo on engaging the ideological minefield of US-Taiwan-China relations.

The artist embraces revision, contradiction, and fallibility in a culture that prizes singular genius.

From epics to lyrics, Rowan Ricardo Phillips considers poetry’s reckoning with history and how writing will reflect our current crisis for future generations.

The writer on using Chaucer’s Middle English to channel transgressive figures, rethink gender, and experience the pleasures of language.

The Man Booker finalist on telling a story from the perspective of a spirit and writing to expose historical truths.

On Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a witty and subversive novel about life in a fourteenth century convent.

The poet on her new collection and how a person lost to history can survive in the imaginary possibilities of art.

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

All monuments commemorate the same / falsehood The gilt is genuine and we feel it right / at the surface of our discontent / Anger like so many lustrous mounts softens / in the rain And stallions and generals must periodically be / re-gilded recommitted to as if / as an abiding law of man / Though if we are honest it is the law that fails us / along with what we can abide

The novelist on the enduring AIDS crisis, the resonance of the Lost Generation, and writing her way around questions.

We are street people. Nomadic by nature. We are the grandchildren of poor, adventurous strangers. Our living radicalizes their legacy.

On telling a story within a story, writing about autocratic regimes, and finding creative inspiration in science experiments.

Ville Kumpulainen is a photographer living and working in Helsinki, Finland. In his new book, Out of Sight (Hatje Cantz, 2017), Kumpulainen manipulates archival images to solidify the tenuous connection between present and past, attempting to fill the gaps left between himself and his history.

A film investigating memory and history, premiering exclusively on BOMB, with a brief interview by Alex Zafiris.
