“Many people who call themselves very patriotic, even nationalist, leave [Ukraine], while the people who are actually protecting it are the common people.”
Literary Fiction
Editors: Jesse McCarthy & Tara K. Menon
Past Editor: Nicholas Dames
Sublime Neutrality
In contemporary fiction, “literary evil” has been replaced by “neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters”—but what are the consequences of this indifference to evil and the assumed moral neutrality?
“Gestures of Refusal”: A Conversation with Sarah Bernstein and Daisy Lafarge
“Why do we want our characters to be innocent, as if we are innocent ourselves?”
Difficult Empathies
“What would a successful war novel look like? This question concealed a deeper question I had: What would a truthful Kashmir novel look like?”
“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.
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.
Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City”
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
“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.
Fool’s Gold
In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will be conscripted to marketing duties, obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide glowing snippets to hype their friends and colleagues too.
Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
Franzen’s Anger
“Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset.”
“There Are More Things”: Benjamín Labatut on Betrayal, Fiction, and the Future
“If I’m honest, I never came back to Chile, at least not to the country of my early childhood, an inferno in which I was happy.”
Tender Gossip: Darryl Pinckney’s “Come Back in September”
Is there a writing life than can safely dispense with categories like identity and commitment, which count so much in how we live now?
Leon Forrest: “Make a Way Out of No Way”
"He regarded with skepticism and clarity the temptations to make racial identity the foundation of our humanity."
Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250
How to interpret Coleridge’s voluminous patchwork of triumphs, fragments, stolen snippets, and unrealized plans? Does any larger pattern emerge?
“Black Genius Against the World”
In 1937, a newspaper trumpeted two speculative fiction stories—“Black Internationale” and “Black Empire”— as dramatically as if they were news.
World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022
What can readers learn from five centuries of circumnavigation?
“Once It Is Written, It Is Forgotten”: Kate Zambreno on Hervé Guibert
“So I must begin again, when I only have months left to write it.”
“The Last Samurai,” Unread
“In a world where the imagined purpose of the novel is to entertain—not to teach or spark further inquiry—The Last Samurai dissents.”
“The Breath of Life”: Sheila Heti on Art, Loss, and Immortality
“Let it become the thing that leads you through your days for years on end—just allowing that problem to live in front of you and to guide you.”