The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

Thomas Pletzinger: I think it can be confusing, but I wanted it to be a kind of a voyage for the reader too.

Is that a kid crying in the back?

Sufjan Stevens: Yeah, that’s my nephew, my sister’s two-year-old. I’m surrounded by stuffed animals right now.

TP: I’m actually surrounded by a collection of old Donald Duck comics. (laughter) I’m at my sister’s house too and my little nephew just woke up and came in here. He’s three and a half.

—BOMB 115/Spring2011

Harry Mathews from A to Z, Sort Of…

Lynne Tillman: “X.” All the X words.

Harry Mathews: X is an algebraic symbol. It means what you say it means. Not only what it means. It’s a variable.

LT: You play with variables.

HM: So I would say that anything I have said in this interview, the opposite is probably also true.

LT: “Y”? What about yearnings?

HM: It’s a word which I think I have used several times and it’s a word which has always touched me a great deal—it seems to be what runs life.

LT: Yearnings.

HM: Not necessarily, “Whatever is, it shouldn’t be that way.” There’s also room for, “Whatever is, should be more so.”

LT: “Z,” zealot because of the sects and religious references. I was wondering where your zeal lies.

HM: You can’t have too much of it. You can’t have too much zeal, but you can’t have too few zealots.

—BOMB 26/Winter 1989

I like the idea that fiction is a license to lie. It takes the mundane and constructs something interesting out of it. Fiction is usually a perversion of what happened into what could happen. Fiction converts ordinary life into hard gossip.

—Padgett Powell, BOMB 55 1996

I find the whole process of writing gets more and more complicated. The more I know about it, the harder it is to do. Because I think one’s vision of things and how the story should be gets more complex.

—Bobbie Ann Mason, BOMB 28, 1989

On the Road … to a young would-be fictionist the book said, in effect, that it was all right not to have a destination, that the seething directionless energy that I felt might become something, might be the basis for the making of a work of art. That was very important.

—Eric Kraft, BOMB 64, 1998

The astonishing thing, I think, is that at the moment when you are most truly alone, when you truly enter a state of solitude, that is the moment when you are not alone anymore, when you start to feel your connection with others.

Paul Auster, BOMB 23 1988

Every young man or girl nowadays ponders about his or her identity without even realizing what it is. My identity is “I”. It takes a long time to learn that that much celebrated “I” is never lost, but never really found either.

—Gregor Von Rezzori, BOMB 1988

Yes. I think in all of us, the source of our greatest strengths is always inextricably bound with our weaknesses, our deceptions.

—Mona Simpson, BOMB 1987