Both novels and non-fiction suggest exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness are central to digital capitalism.
Essays
In Free Fall: Watching “Joyland”
“Joyland” joins a resurgence of Urdu films in recent years whose social realist orientation it both shares and disavows.
Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
B-Sides: Neil M. Gunn’s “Highland River”
Freud taught that childhoods shape our adult selves with unresolved trauma. But this novel shows that childhood joy can shape adulthood, too.
The Low-Tech Side of Agri-Food Innovation
Is “low-tech” a more sustainable alternative to moving fast and breaking things? Or just a new iteration of the neoliberal fantasy?
“An Extraordinarily Metal Way to Be”: Authorship and Medieval Women
Maybe we have something to learn from their proclivity for the irreconcilable, unruly, and open-ended.
Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
B-Sides: Georges Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”
One of the strangest, most devastating works of Holocaust literature is about games.
Symonds’s Facts, Our Future
One Victorian historian realized that if ideas of sexual morality changed across time, then 19th-century Britain could change, too.
Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns.
Socialist Nostalgia, Cuban State Power
Is it ever possible to reconcile clashing visions of national memory?
Derry Girls and the Absurdity of Adulthood
A work of absurdist art that entertains, but also carries a surprisingly grown-up message about taking responsibility for the state of our politics.
B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”
“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”
B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy”
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City”
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
As Society Evolves, So Too Does the University
Faculty and students can—and must—govern their own institutions, so that universities maintain their vital power.
B-Sides: Daphne Du Maurier, “Monte Verità”
Few writers have been as beloved by readers and underrated by reviewers as Daphne du Maurier. What irked them?
Guy Horror: “Rosemary’s Baby” and Coercive Control
Fifty-five years after its release, “Rosemary's Baby” is still a masterful depiction of abuse we are only now beginning to officially recognize as “coercive control.”
Neoliberal Keywords: Creative, Passionate, Confident
When did we all become so empowered, passionate, and self-enterprising?
“Tomb of Sand” Brings Hindi Literature to the World
Despite the fact that Hindi is the language of more than 400 million people, Hindi fiction is rarely translated.