Category
Reviews
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Use and Reuse: Dancing Again with Robert Rauschenberg
“Looking at the Rauschenberg archives was a revelation to me. I’ve never handled a silkscreen, and physics and geometry weren’t my best subjects in high school, but even I could see how ‘Set and Reset’ could be recreated because of the Rauschenberg studio’s meticulous records management.”
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The Rise and Fall of Internationalism
On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted to the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the UN must issue an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to disarm or face attack. UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix countered that there was no smoking gun. After weeks of…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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Books Full of Women
Biography never tells the story of a single life. Even a biography ostensibly focused on an individual also tells the story of its subject’s family, friends, or associates; it invites us to download bits of the lives of others and make them our own: biography as file sharing. Collective biography compounds the melding of author,…
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On the Itinerant as Philosopher: An Interview with Aman Sethi
Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, a portrait of a day laborer in modern Delhi, is the latest contribution to an emerging subgenre of creative nonfictional books about Indian cities—itself a subset of a growing fascination with the poetics and practices of the metropolises of the Global South—that includes Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004), Katherine Boo’s…
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Bleak House
Christine Schutt’s small, distinguished oeuvre is notable for the attention it has received from awards committees. Her first novel, Florida, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her second, All Souls, made the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. Her short stories have won O. Henry Awards and a Pushcart Prize. In 2010, she received a Guggenheim…
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When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi-multiplatinum. We did not hate, because we knew the truth: we too binge, chant, and passionately blur the pages of our passports with so many stamps from Senegal, Salvador,…
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Public Picks 2013
Since we launched Public Books twelve months ago more than a hundred essays and reviews have appeared on the site, discussing works in a striking variety of genres and media, and our editors have considered nigh on a thousand candidates for review. It would seem an occasion to look back and take stock. At the…
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
With over 29 million copies sold in trade paperback alone and translations afoot in languages from Arabic to Tagalog, the Fifty Shades trilogy …
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Politics: In the Halls of Powerand Out of Doors
Historical scholarship about the United States has been transformed in the past forty years. The new history, partly prompted by the politics of the 1960s, dismissed earlier ones that, in important ways, represent the golden era of academic history in public life, despite their limitations. These were political histories or, more precisely, histories of political…
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Fostered Alike By Beauty and By Fear
Foster kids are often called orphans of the living. It’s a particularly apt designation and rich emotional territory for a novel. Foster kids can neither mourn their missing parents nor fully attach to their surrogates; they are caught in the purgatory between a full loss and a fresh start. It’s a wonder more authors don’t…
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Up from the Shadows
“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a supernatural romance that spans 1920s Shanghai, a World War II–era South Sea island, and modern-day Japan. The novel opens in 2010 Tokyo…
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Surviving the City
Once Oprah Winfrey selected Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, for her revamped Book Club, the new author garnered widespread publicity and the book quickly found its place on best-seller lists. Journalists and critics, invoking Isabel Wilkerson’s recent nonfiction book The Warmth of Other Suns, quickly claimed that Mathis’s book was about…
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Wanting Out
I can remember the first time I met Mark Anthony Neal. I was a graduate student, and he was visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class entitled “(Il)Legible Blackness.” The course aimed to familiarize students with recent work in black aesthetic theory and included discussion of a wide range of artists and…
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A World Where We Are All Autistic
On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given that Singer had publicly claimed that parents should be allowed to euthanize children with severe disabilities, and that Johnson was herself severely disabled. Born with muscular dystrophy…
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Body Projects: The Killer Makeover in Recent YA Dystopias
As the Hunger Games begin, the makeover—that staple of reality television—is itself made over from dream into nightmare. Forced to fight to the death against other teens on live TV, contestants such as sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen must first give themselves up to a team of stylists at the “Remake Center.” Rather than depicting this beautification…
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Hopelessly Devoted: Why We Watch Sports
My father called me the other day to ask if I was in a good mood. The Mets were in first place, having triumphed in their season opener. These days Mets fan cherish even the briefest of moments on top. During the brighter era of the mid-eighties, my father, a trial lawyer, childhood Brooklyn Dodgers…
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Another Fistfight in Heaven
By the second page of Sherman Alexie’s newest collection of short stories, Blasphemy, it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to pull any punches. As the narrator of “Cry Cry Cry” observes with reference to his meth-snorting, faux-wisdom-spouting cousin, “Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.” There’s nothing “traditional”…
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Dudes, Bodies, and Criminals
For those accustomed to the dry wit of judicial opinions, there is an undeniable charm to a novel that, within its first ten pages, paraphrases the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona US Supreme Court case with colloquial gusto: “The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never…
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Landscape with Corpses
Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room is a stunning and disturbing novel of and about nightmares. Early on, the protagonist, Elinor Brooke, slashes off her hair in an act of vengeance against her femininity, then falls asleep: “she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention…
