The most interesting science fiction is not about the future at all but about the present.
Literary Fiction
Editors: Jesse McCarthy & Tara K. Menon
Past Editor: Nicholas Dames
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
Greenwell’s “Cleanness”: From Debt to Care
Garth Greenwell challenges readers to see how sex—especially for queer people—might be an act of difficult but healing care.
Safe at Home in Late Capitalism
Baseball is ideal for explaining American economic precarity: the players try desperately to get home safe, but almost always fail to do so.
“The Places Where Things Blur”: Namwali Serpell on “The Old Drift”
“One of the reasons it took so long to write is that—as I would joke with my friends—I found myself writing the great Zambian novel.”
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale’s stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
When’s the Beef?
In Terry Bisson’s 1991 sci-fi story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” two characters discuss alien life-forms that have been attempting to make contact with their species. The conversation returns again ...
Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically ...
Stephen McCauley on What Makes a Comic Novel
Stephen McCauley is the author of a bevy—a raft, even—of beloved comic novels. Recent ones include My Ex-Life, Alternatives to Sex, and ...
MAGA: Margaret Atwood’s Gilead Again
Margaret Atwood has argued that there is “within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it ...
Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
What Can “Women’s Fiction” Do for Women?
“I am the proud and happy writer of popular fiction,” says novelist Jennifer Weiner, “and I would never argue that it matters as much as the award-winning ...
Temporal Lines
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Temporal Lines: An Interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez,” by ...
B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included ...
What If Keats Had Lived?
What if John Keats—the brilliant Romantic poet, whose revolutionary lyrics blended classical myth and sensuous imagery—hadn’t died at age 25? The Warm South, a new novel by Paul Kerschen, reimagines ...
“Down the Rabbit Hole of America”: Katha Pollitt Talks with Susan Jane Gilman
Susan Jane Gilman is a storyteller with a lot to say—about life in our unequal and bewildering America, about refugees, about what happens to youthful ambition ...
B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”
John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how ...
Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge ...