A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Tag: Vintage
On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
When Dogs Bite
“I could tell you that I was beating the dog because I was beaten, that I was six and stupid and knew no better,” Marwand recounts to his cousin Zia in eastern Afghanistan. “But here is the other ...
Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of ...
America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information ...
“For the Black and White Youth of the South”
Speaking with Jerome Tarshis in 1974, Ernest J. Gaines talked about his desire to write a story with “the barber shop type of thing.” Looking at James Joyce’s “Ivy ...