Section
Literary Fiction
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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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“Their Lives Go On beyond the Book”: A Conversation with Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
“It’s wonderful to be haunted by characters; because they aren’t ‘real,’ they can do or say anything.”
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Writing Between Collapse and Renewal: Christine Lai’s “Landscapes”
“To exist between collapse and renewal is to live with an awareness that destruction has always been with us.”
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John Plotz on Earthsea, Anarchism, and Ursula K. Le Guin
“Rather than thinking of creative arts and sciences as ‘two cultures,’ we should realize that they’re running on parallel tracks.”
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Groff and the Radical Act of Paying Attention
“I had read Groff all wrong, subjecting her to a sexist and dismissive logic.”
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Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath
“I wanted to make nature a source of conflict, but also a source of joy and beauty and wonder and delight.”
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Capitalism Alone Is Not the Problem
Eleanor Catton’s “Birnam Wood” is a leftist novel filled with radicals who fail to exemplify their own ideals.
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The Frankfurt Book Fair and Its Cupboards
“In order to understand the multi-dimensionality of the global book industry, we urgently need to move beyond standard methods alone.”
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“Ideological Sci-Fi”: A Conversation with Julius Taranto
“When to form political certainties, and when to take political action, are among the central questions the book explores.”
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Did the College Admissions Essay Remake Literature?
Is the college admissions essay (CAE) a useful tool for understanding ongoing transformations in literature, academia, and publishing?
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Introduction to Afropantheology
Afropantheology seeks the freedom of the artist to express stories unbridled by Western labels and terminologies and the need for conformity to defined (often limited) literary standards.
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“We Thought We Were Living in an Enlightened Age”: Talking with Artem Chapeye
“Many people who call themselves very patriotic, even nationalist, leave [Ukraine], while the people who are actually protecting it are the common people.”
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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?
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“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?”
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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?”
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“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.
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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.
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Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City”
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
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“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.
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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.
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Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
