On making documentary art and the imperfect pursuit of empathy.

Presenting the missing in prints and installations.

He came in search of clues for an article about the disappearances that happened months before he arrived. 

Artist and writer discuss their globe-spanning travels.

Unchanging times, in Joan Didion’s South and West

Two films tell the tragic story of reporter Christine Chubbuck’s on-air suicide in 1974.

“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.”

“If you can’t go to church, and the only way you can pray, or connect to your god, is through another process, then that becomes the thing you do.”

“The enemy is indifference.”

Crime, gossip, and feeding the media machine.

The bodies began appearing in 1993: girls and young women, often mutilated and raped, discarded in lots and ravines on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez.

Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction is a hilarious and engrossing new book that lives up to its title, blending journalism and invention. Absorbed in the book’s infectious narrative, you forget about the fact/fiction framework and simply revel in the half-true tale of Silverstein’s preposterous efforts to find material for a magazine article.

More than a decade ago now, I came across a book titled Samba, by a woman with a long last name, really a first and last name run together, that I recognized: Guillermo Prieto.

I had never conducted an interview via e-mail before my conversation with the Colombian author Laura Restrepo; therefore, I wasn’t prepared to get answers that had the quality of polished writing. 

The author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, chats with novelist Patrick McGrath about the most famous resident of Broadmoor—Dr. William C. Minor.

With scant exception, the writing of literary criticism is a balkanized art. 

Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, a partially fictionalized account of one English journalist’s struggle to save a Bosnian child, captures the moral dilemmas of war reporting.

Che Guevara: celebrated warrior, revolutionary leader, figure of myth. In his biography of the Argentine-turned-Cuban hero, John Lee Anderson goes behind the scenes to unearth the man. This article is part of the Bohen Series on Critical Discourse.

Colm Toíbín discusses the power of the written word upon the completion of his first novel The South in conversation with Lynne Tillman from 1992.