Madison Smartt Bell

Do you want to be a writer or do you want to write? That's been a sort koan-question in a writer's education for at least as long as I've been on the game. Option one is, officially, the wrong answer. You're supposed to be doing the thing because you have...

Hillary Johnson in the 1980s was a writer so far ahead of her time practically no one understood what she was doing.

The one novel she published in that period, Physical Culture, describes levels of self-mutilation that put it over the top at a time when...

How many of us are old enough to remember just how scary Charles Manson was, back in the day? Of course he and his minions only did away with half a dozen victims--not 10 percent of the people that die in car wrecks every day. But it was the quality...

The earthquake in Haiti, aside from killing a couple of hundred thousand people in the space of a heartbeat, has put so many survivors' lives in danger that even now, two months after the cataclysm, it is difficult to think about any thing else. It's hard to imagine...

For too long before this last natural disaster, Haiti has been full of hands with nothing to do, and a lot of those hands have picked up guns. In the pressing need to rebuild the capital and other regions leveled by the earthquake, those hands could be put to more...

If Pat Robertson didn't say outrageously repugnant things, such as his recent remark that the devastating earthquake that leveled the capital of Haiti was Divine punishment for Haitians having made a pact with the Devil, two hundred and some years ago, to give them strength to break free of the...

An unusual person came to a reading I gave not long ago in Jackson, Mississippi. I was presenting a novel about the Confederate cavalry general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, once well-known in that part of the world. The person brought in an unexploded artillery shell from the Civil War, which everyone...

I saw "Coco Avant Chanel" in Paris last spring, because I wanted to see a French film and "Coco" (somewhat to my dismay) was the only French movie playing in the two multi-screen cinemas around the Carrefour de l'Odéon, the rest of them being American horror shows with subtitles, or...