Literary Style
“Most definitions of style pare away its contradictions in order to make self-consistent arguments. I wanted to own up to style’s inconvenient range of meanings, to try to explain that range rather than resolve it.”
The great lost American fragment novel.
A new collection of criticism and reportage considers Trump, Bellow, and the pleasures of close reading.
Congratulations to Ward on winning the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Ghost stories, paganism, the blues, and silent cinema are just some of the fixations of two authors known for novels steeped in history.
“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.”
“People love to underrate plot, because it makes them sound like they’re beyond it, like plot is best left to Danielle Steele.“
“Post-love, post-work, post-faith, post-home. What’s left?”
One of my favorite books of short fiction from the last few years is Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts. I often assign stories from it in my workshops and have been waiting for an opportunity to teach the whole collection.
“It seems to me that style becomes a kind of crucible—an acid bath in which the self is broken down, producing something unique, something new.”
Paper Clip is a weekly compilation of online articles, artifacts and other—old, new, and sometimes BOMB-related.
I first met Rachel Kushner in Toronto McCarren airport in, I think, 2007. We were both there for the International Festival of Authors (IFOA). I’d just spent several hours in US immigration detention (the asshole border guard had opined that I “didn’t deserve” my visa) and I was heartily pissed off at missing a flight to New York.
Twenty chapters of poetry compose Clark Coolidge’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the division between each a shoddy dam allowing themes to spill back and forth—geology, Zukofsky, Dalí.
“I couldn’t have gone to Woodstock because I’m not fit to be a nudist.”
The linguistic contortions in Roussel’s work have influenced artists and writers from Duchamp to Foucault to Ashbery. Two recent translators of Roussel discuss his outlandish creations.
The Lit Crawl NYC festival, sponsored by BOMB, takes place this Saturday, September 10th. The festival’s co-founder and director, Suzanne Russo, chatted with us briefly about the weekend’s exciting events.
In the ambitious stories in Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, psychological insight is derived from the characters’ exposure to extreme duress. Shepard discusses his short stories with fiction writer Christie Hodgen.
Writer Thomas Pletzinger and New York-musician Sufjan Stevens on life on the road, their favorite brooklyn haunts, and Pletzinger’s novel Funeral for a Dog.
Gordon Lish has loomed large in the background of the American short story for nearly half a century. His recent Collected Fictions provides a re-affirmation of his incredible influence on a form he so clearly treasures. B.C. Edwards spoke with Lish over the phone about revision, reduction and the silence that precedes reading.
Kevin Killian and David Brazil have done a great service in their new Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945–85. The selection is wide-ranging, eclectic, and generally highly intelligent.
