Category
Reviews
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
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Rachel Cusk’s Diminishing Returns
“Cusk remains one of the most formally restless novelists of our time. The trouble is that this inventiveness may now be outpacing Cusk’s thinking.”
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If on a Winter’s Night a Reader…
We read to find ourselves. But what if, instead, we end up finding ourselves only in books? What if we can’t distinguish our life from those we read about? What if we stop trying to?
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My Job Is to Fulfill Your Infantile Desire
“The outrageous expectations placed on Chinese e-commerce couriers may surprise western readers. … Such interactions document consumers’ obliviousness to labor along the supply chain.”
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Birds Beyond Birding
“Looking at birds helps us notice connections, imagine better worlds, and build new solidarities across differences, including across species.”
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Literature in the Time of Suicide
“In both these Spanish-language novels, thinking about suicide is not only to grapple with someone else’s decision to die, but also inevitably with one’s own decision to go on living.”
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Can Centuries-Old Nuns Really Save Us from Ourselves?
“Can looking to women beholden to God help us escape a society so fixated on itself? Or does it simply package those devout lives as the latest content for a culture industry desperate for the next trending topic?”
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Conflicted Futures, Convex Literatures
“The novel’s distinctive capacity for revealing unexpected links can shed new light on how we consider and counter crises.”
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The Allure of Postcolonial Pathos
“To what extent might the Booker—and venues like it in Europe and the US—be drawn for self-serving reasons to fiction like Kiran Desai’s?”
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B-Sides: “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez
“I spent my adolescence in Buenos Aires and made my own fumbling pilgrimages to that city’s cemeteries.”
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On Our Nightstands: July 2026
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. Nicholas Dames Editor in Chief Frederic…
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What Keeps the Dutch Up at Night?
Although the novels’ protagonists are fascinating, even magnetic characters, they are eerie—all the more so because their unsettling behavior forces the reader to confront what most worries the Netherlands.
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Toward the Next Century of Carmen Martín Gaite
A literary genius who remained in Fascist Franco Spain, she created new, hybrid literary genres, even while fluidly moving from fiction to nonfiction and back.
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You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Supply Chains!
“Logistics,” warns Susan Zieger, “reveals how the illicit economy is the legitimate economy: the nature of free trade prevents the two from ever being separated.”
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The Pain Is the Point: On the Violent Realities of Capitalist Sport
In 2022, critical sports scholar Chen Chen uncovered a staggering statistic: The three leading academic journals in sports management (Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, and European Sport Management Quarterly), with over 74 years of combined history between them, had published a grand total of 14 articles that mentioned the word “capitalism” more than…
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“Heated Rivalry” Is the “Moby-Dick” of Canadian Gay Hockey Shows
The literary genre of contemporary MM romance realizes an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being.
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Lineages of the Engineering State: On China, the United States, and the Future
“Perhaps, when we claim that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of the West, what we really mean is that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of American journalists and defense intellectuals in the Washington, DC area.”
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Undoing Platform Humanitarianism
If humanitarian aid organizations embrace tech, they will only be powering the surveillance empire opposed to their goals.
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Resistance Disguised as a History Lesson: Fascism and the University
Her student—a former Nazi stormtrooper—was proof that no one was lost to the new regime, that every person might choose to refuse.
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Who Owns Argentine Football?
In early 20th century Buenos Aires, football clubs emerged as institutions of sociability and mutual aid, but also of anarchist resistance, immigrant solidarity, and antifascist organizing.
