Public Books
James Ley
Public Books
a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship
  • Essays
  • Interviews
  • Sections
    • View All
    • Anthropology & Religion
    • Antiquities
    • Art
    • Borderlands
    • Capitalism
    • Digital Humanities
    • Film
    • Global Black History
    • Higher Education
    • Literary Fiction
    • Literature in Translation
    • Poetry
    • Politics
    • Print/Screen
    • Sociology
    • Sports
    • Systems and Futures
    • Technology
    • TV
    • Urbanism
    • Videogames
  • Series
    • View All
    • B-Sides
    • The Book That Made Me
    • Crisis Cities
    • An Engineer Reads a Novel
    • Migrant Futures
    • On Our Nightstands
    • Public Streets
    • Public Thinker
    • Quizzical
    • Shoptalk
    • Syllabi
    • Virtual Roundtables
    • @X
  • Podcasts
    • Public Books 101
    • Novel Dialogue
    • Primary Sources
  • Donate
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
James Ley

James Ley

James Ley was the Inaugural Editor of the Sydney Review of Books from January 2013 to July 2015 and is now its Contributing Editor. He is the author of The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). icon

My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion

By James Ley

Ann Quin is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits.

The Perspective Is the Story

By James Ley

Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.

The Necessity of an Alternative

By James Ley

Margaret Thatcher made her notorious claim that there is “no such thing as society” in an interview with Women’s Own magazine published in ...

Get Our Weekly Newsletter

Most Viewed

  • What Films Should We Teach?: A conversation about the Canon
  • Virtual Roundtable on Women Directors
  • “There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed
  • “There Are More Things”: Benjamín Labatut on Betrayal, Fiction, and the Future
  • Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”

LISTEN TO PRIMARY SOURCES

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates on Tony Judt
    Eyal Press 5.9.2022

Subscribe to RSS

Support Public Books

Editors’ Pick

  • Where Is All the Book Data?
    Melanie Walsh 10.4.2022
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submissions
  • Partners
  • News/Events
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Public Books Logo
© 2023 Public Books.TM All Rights Reserved