Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a part of a small band of Indian reviewers and authors invited to see what the fuss was over the Edinburgh International…
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First-Class Reading and Airport Futures
In-flight magazines are the nadir of non-literary writing. How did they come to be a destination for A-list authors? …
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Quiz: Gertrude Stein or a Children’s Book?
In her essay “In The Great Green Room,” Anne E. Fernald discusses the surprising influence of literary modernism on Margaret Wise Brown, author of the legendary children’s book Goodnight Moon (1946). Or maybe it’s not so surprising: after all, Brown saw children as “an audience sensitive to the sheer elements of the English language.” A five-year-old, she remarked, was…
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Lady Grace and the Factory Girls: Chicago, 1900–1933
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Truth be told, factory girls living in the early 1900s downtown Chicago boarding houses didn’t see much of the street, though their lives were very much a part of the public fabric—or its underbelly. They worked twelve-hour days…
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Indian Writers under Siege: A Roundtable
It is hard to remember a time when literature attracted so much front-page space, prime airtime, or mass attention in the Indian public sphere as it did in 2015. But not only was this importance accumulated through a particularly perverse chain of events, it was also a particularly toxic kind of importance. Writers, scholars, and…
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A Brief History of Women Accepting Oscars
From the comfort of the couch, the Academy Awards hold a perverse attraction. What will fall flat more often: the dreadful jokes, or the award recipients as they clamor up the stairs to claim their prize? How far will the host go in biting the hand that feeds? How bright the teeth, how lofty the…
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Making “Room”: An Interview with Novelist and Screenwriter Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room is the story of a 5-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother and has never seen the outside world. Donoghue recently adapted her novel into a screenplay, and the resulting film, starring Brie Larson, has been sweeping up accolades. It’s nominated for four Academy Awards on…
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The Future of Scalia’s Originalism
Speculation about Justice Antonin Scalia’s legacy has quickly gravitated to the staying power of his originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. Whether it will …
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Remembering Bowie: A Makeshift Père Lachaise at Lafayette and Houston
Anyone walking down Manhattan’s Houston Street on January 13 might have had some idea about what to expect upon reaching …
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Public Books Tote Bag Giveaway
What are you reading? Our new Public Books tote bag, which features a panel from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, is perfect for library runs, trips to the bookstore, and starting conversations with strangers on the subway. Click here to enter to win one of these limited-edition totes!
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Harare in Four Pharmacies
Village Pharmacy in Harare’s upper income Borrowdale Shopping Centre is clean and quiet. There’s a faint antiseptic smell. Its shelves are neatly stacked with imported bath foam …
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Master of the Flying Nothing
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. Wrestling is based on iconography, on signatures. Wrestlers work in signature moves, in signature styles, in catchphrases and slogans…
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To Be “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Star Dust”: A Suicide Note from the University of Hyderabad
In India, like elsewhere, the university is a place of upward mobility. It is also the tense meeting ground of social difference; of young people across caste, gender, religious, and sexual identities who encounter each other in the space of the classroom, where the divide between urban and rural, between English and the regional languages,…
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Rick Moody Annotates David Bowie
In light of the passing of David Bowie, we asked Rick Moody, who’s written extensively on Bowie, to annotate the lyrics of “Joe the Lion.” Click the highlighted words to see his notes. Joe the lion Went to the bar A couple of drinks on the house and he said “Tell you who you are…
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How to Hide in Plain Sight: A Visual Essay
In an age of constant surveillance, is it possible to find autonomy online? In our book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, Helen Nissenbaum and I look at how Internet users protect their data from governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. One strategy in particular drew our attention: obfuscation, or the deliberate production of…
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Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in…
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Street Space—North Street, Belfast
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The Belfast city center is fractured, divided by motorways, parking lots, empty buildings, and big box stores. Its 19th-century heyday put it on the international map of textile production, which transformed and enriched its built structure. This tight…
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2015’s Most-Read on the Public Books Blog
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over our most popular features from last year, here were the top five most-read essays from our blog: “Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking,” by Christopher Schaberg It’s a phrase that’s parroted endlessly, but is anyone quite sure exactly what it means? “In the Great Green Room:…
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Quiz: Can You Match the Punk Memoirist to the Lyric?
In “The Female Body of Punk,” Ivan Kreilkamp reviews recent memoirs by Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, and Carrie Brownstein. As Kreilkamp puts it, “Although these women position themselves in very different ways in relation to the movement and the music, their life narratives reveal the possibility of a punk history centered less around the…
