“Many people who call themselves very patriotic, even nationalist, leave [Ukraine], while the people who are actually protecting it are the common people.”
Tag: Short Stories
Sublime Neutrality
In contemporary fiction, “literary evil” has been replaced by “neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters”—but what are the consequences of this indifference to evil and the assumed moral neutrality?
B-Sides: Haruki Murakami’s “After the Quake”
How, Murakami asks, can community after the earthquake be structured around self-reflection rather than cruelty?
On Our Nightstands: January 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Past Dictators Never Die
What happens when a regime founded upon exclusion, racism, nationalism, and an authoritarian leader ends? In Spain, such a regime never really ended.
Shirley Hazzard, Poet of Aftermath
Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog
Departing from a fixed form, some Latin American writers employed the short story as a laboratory of writing.
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale’s stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...