BOMB Magazine

1 week ago | bombmagazine.org | Cat Zhang

Who is Julian Castronovo? According to Google, he is a twentysomething Chinese American filmmaker who graduated from Brown University’s Modern Culture and Media program. Predictably, he vapes and likes Thomas Pynchon; he makes low-budget experimental films for which he coins bogus-sounding neologisms like “inverse autofiction,” as if “autofiction” weren’t already confusing enough.

3 weeks ago | bombmagazine.org | Andrew Durbin

Robert (Bob) Glück’s About Ed (New York Review Books, 2023) is the clearest book I’ve read on the impossibility of grief. It helps us grievers make sense of nonsensical death. Ed Aulerich-Sugai, Bob’s first love, whose dream journals are central to the book, died in 1994. Yet he is immortalized here, through his dreams, through memory.

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Wallace Ludel

One great engine of John Liles’s Bees, And After (Yale University Press), the 119th winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, is how the poet illustrates the profound interconnectivity of the living. We all want what’s best for ourselves and our loved ones, we all have desires, we all want proximity to whatever or whomever it is we call home. The difference between the reader and the stones and critters of the world becomes a matter more of language than of who has how many legs.

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Rob Arcand

For Jennifer Walshe, the term composition names an expansive field of experimental techniques, not a routine process of any sort. Long before becoming a professor of composition at Oxford, she developed an eclectic compositional practice spanning Western art music and DIY traditions, adapting the formal features of opera into works that are affecting, challenging, and often supremely funny.

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Osman Can Yerebakan

Thaddeus Mosley often prefers to listen to jazz in the comfort of his house in the historic Mexican War Streets district of Pittsburgh. “I am a great jazz lover, but my studio is often too loud to hear anything,” he says, “although music is a nice company to have.” The artist of enigmatically morphed wooden sculptures pays attention to his own rhythm between the hand and the log, which is oftentimes cherry, walnut, or hickory.