Book Reviews

Language is Power When Repurposing Twain

by Paula Bomer for Statement of Record

A review of James by Percival Everett

January – Sara Gallardo

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Nefer, the teenage protagonist of the slim, classic Argentine novel January, first published in 1958, is pregnant and doesn’t want to be.
[TW: sexual violence]

South – Babak Lakghomi

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Stories are important when we live in a world where the truth is hidden and ugly, a world where most people have so little power over anything, where fate feels like wind, powerful and inexplicable.

All Your Children, Scattered – Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Underneath the narrative of three broken generations simmers the horrific damage of colonialism, both by the French and Belgian people, by racism, and lastly, and perhaps most confusingly, by fatherlessness.

You’ll Like It Here – Ashton Politanoff

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Doesn’t nostalgia just mean, “I miss you?”

Teenager- Bud Smith

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Teenager shreds the American dream during its long embrace.

Interviews With Other Authors

Dennis Cooper

w/ Paula Bomer for Full Stop

A novel isn’t a painting, it’s language that’s been organized until it has the power to bombard pleasurably. The premise that ‘showing’ is somehow more respectful to a reader than ‘telling’ is illogical nonsense.

Writing Across Entire Lifetimes: Joshua Henkin

by Paula Bomer for BOMB

A novel that explores how a family grapples with dementia.

Self Care as Rebellion: An Interview with Jessie Chaffee

By Paula Bomer for Los Angeles Review of Books

In Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, a young American woman travels from Boston to Florence, knowing no one and speaking little Italian.

Jonathan Reiss

w/ Paula Bomer for Full Stop

I’ve come to believe that the people in this world who do really terrible things are the ones who have no space in their minds for evil. I think one of the healthiest things a person can have is a relationship with their propensity to do wrong.

Elisa Albert

w/ Paula Bomer for Full Stop

We identify so completely with our own suffering, then wish to visit our suffering upon others in turn. Makes one wish we could just have a nice simple fistfight and be done.

Christopher Hacker

w/ Paula Bomer for Full Stop

We need to speak the name of terrible things occasionally, to touch these things with our imaginations, in order to be reminded that the euphemisms we use are not the thing itself.

Julian Tepper

by Paula Bomer for Full Stop

Writing is its own experiment and we cannot determine whether the experiment has worked until we’ve given it a go.