The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

I am an aesthete; that is the one “sin” I confess to. If I do have a public message, it is that aesthetic facts—beauty, style and elegance, grace and connectedness—are crucial to life.

—Alexander Nehamas, BOMB 65/Fall 1998

Novel writing for me is a process of finding the right form of suffocation. Productive, generative suffocation forces you to be wily.

—Heidi Julavits, BOMB 119/Spring 2012

Change won’t always dominate human existence the way it does now. We are living at a moment of technological acceleration that can’t last forever. What happens beyond that?

—Richard Powers, BOMB 64/Summer 1998

My intellectual heroes are people like Nietzsche, who think that many things happen for no particular reason. But once they happen you can use them for your purposes. And if you use them successfully, you have given them a reason.

—Alexander Nehamas, BOMB 65/Fall 1998

I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America.

I’m not writing like a Richard Ford or a John Updike, that’s not the only America. It has many pluralities. I’m writing about an American immigrant group who are undergoing many transformations within themselves. And who, by their very presence, are changing the country. America is not the America that, until recently, has come through in contemporary popular fiction.

—Bharati Mukherjee, BOMB 29/Fall 1989

Crisis is good—it brings change and renewal. The human being is a creature of crisis, a fictional creature. For we’re creatures of desire. If we didn’t invent desires, if we didn’t invent fictions, we would die.

—Angélica Gorodischer, BOMB 32/Summer 1990

There’s definitely an element of writing myself out of the darkness, even as I’m writing about dark times. Things are so serious that laughing at the world just feels transgressive. In a way it’s a case of the “church giggles”—when you’re supposed to keep a straight face, you need to feel something, you have to laugh.

—Miles Klee, BOMBlog 2012

There is a lot of self-consciousness about writing, but if you had total self-consciousness you’d never get anything done.

—Julian Barnes, BOMB 21/Fall 1987