BOMB Magazine

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Grace Byron

The characters in Barbara, Joni Murphy’s third novel, don’t eat. Not really. They drink coffee and wine, smoke cigarettes, and order dessert. They float through the 1950s and ’60s.

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Eliza Barry Callahan |Leslie Jamison |Maggie Nelson

Eliza Barry Callahan's debut novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult, 2025), begins with a drone in her right ear, diagnosed as sudden deafness, that becomes a volatile score, an episode of life seen from an inaudible place outside one’s life, and a white noise exploration of consciousness and time-travel through the partly blanked-out layers of a self. I read the book in a single sitting, then read it again, and then again. I thought of Alice in Wonderland with its soundtrack whited out.

2 months ago | bombmagazine.org | Monica Uszerowicz |Chantal Akerman

Ana María Caballero and Denise Duhamel met when Caballero became Duhamel's graduate poetry student at Florida International University (FIU). A friendship quickly developed, and they worked together on theVERSEverse, a digital poetry gallery Caballero co-founded. Most recently, the two writers met via video conference to discuss motherhood, poetry, and how they handle that mother lode, a rich source of material, in their latest books.

Jan 21, 2025 | bombmagazine.org | Kristen Martin

Kristen Martin’s The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood (Bold Type Books, 2025) begins with an epigraph from Gore Vidal, that in America, “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” It’s an apt prelude to the cyclical history of how America has dealt with its orphaned children.

Jan 6, 2025 | bombmagazine.org | Reza Hasni

I’ve been following the work of visual artist Annie Pendergrast for many years. She has an eye for bright, intoxicating color gradients that stay with the viewer long after the gallery has closed and the ice in the cooler filled with seltzers has melted. Her current exhibition, Writhing Biota at Bozo Mag Gallery in Los Angeles, features paintings of flowers and root systems impacted by climate change. Some of the paintings depict post-apocalyptic bionic flowers—a nod to mass extinction.