June 25, 2013
A take on an imagined dragon boom in the modern world with lots of fire, destruction, cattle-snatching and singing — what, you didn’t know dragons could sing?
Read More
A take on an imagined dragon boom in the modern world with lots of fire, destruction, cattle-snatching and singing — what, you didn’t know dragons could sing?
Read More
A weekly series that celebrates everyone’s favorite part of the author reading: the Q&A. This week, Jami Attenberg and Francesca Segal discuss how to write about home when you're so far away.
Read MoreWith a handful of main characters whose stories we follow for 35 years, Packer attempts to repopulate narratives at the epicenters of the housing collapse and deindustrialization.
Read MoreWe discuss the navigation of a novelistic tone in a work of journalism and whether Jay-Z would be cool with The Unwinding.
Read MoreA weekly series that celebrates everyone’s favorite part of the author reading: the Q&A. This week, Alice McDermott knows her new novel's title is vanilla, but asks you to go with it.
Read MoreA weekly series that celebrates everyone’s favorite part of the author reading: the Q&A. This week, Lisa Hanawalt just likes animals a whole lot.
Read MoreBlack Balloon has just published Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, translated by Will Firth. Despite its title, the novel takes place almost entirely in Croatia and feels so deeply Eastern European in sensibility that I found myself jotting down other books from that region once eclipsed by the Iron Curtain’s shadow. Without further ado, here are ten brilliant and barely-known books from ten countries in Eastern Europe...
Read MoreThree weeks ago, Chechnya was just a name on a map. As reports came in that the main suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were of Chechen extraction, I looked at the books I'd read about Chechnya. What was it like to live, I wondered, in this region that everybody had heard of but nobody knew about?
Read MoreApril is National Poetry Month, and so books of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost (not to mention D.A. Powell and John Ashbery) are doing brisk sales. But, as spoken-word poetry slams remind us, verse hasn't always been confined to the page. Here's a few other places to find poetry today.
Read More
A Black Balloon Publication ©