A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Tag: Essay
On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
We Must Heal Each Other
At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s ...
Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy
Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
A Conversation with Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer has consistently ignored the borders between criticism and autobiography, novel and travel writing, art and life ...
Analytic Rage: The Genius of Jenny Diski
I picked up a copy of Jenny Diski’s first novel, Nothing Natural, at random a few decades ago at an airport bookstore. I read it on the flight from Heathrow to JFK with a degree of shocked ...
The Thread
1 Sometime during my senior year of high school, my mother went on a laundry strike. Her goal, as I understood it, was to get my father to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor, carry them to ...
Prince’s Erotic Democracy
In the 1980s, in the shadow of AIDS, Prince (along with Madonna) brought post-disco polymorphous perversity to the mainstream. As Richard Kim beautifully put it in The Nation last week, “If you were ...
First-Class Reading and Airport Futures
In-flight magazines are the nadir of non-literary writing. How did they come to be a destination for A-list authors? ...
Lady Grace and the Factory Girls: Chicago, 1900–1933
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Truth be told, factory girls living in the early 1900s downtown Chicago boarding houses ...
Rembrandt
Just outside Amsterdam there lives an old, well-known, and respected Dutch painter. He has worked hard throughout his life—but he has only produced, as far as the world knows, a few drawings and one ...
Russia, Today: Part 1
Amid the annexation of Crimea, the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and an emerging proxy war in Syria, many commentators have proclaimed the beginning of a new Cold War between Russia and the ...
Pornography Porn
In the fall of 1990, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I became obsessed with pornography—or, rather, I became obsessed with the feminist debates about it. From the late 1970s until the ...
On Spectacle and Silence
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 1 We sat on the couch ...
Reading Charlie Hebdo across the Atlantic
Like many French citizens, I have never purchased a copy of Charlie Hebdo, the provocative satirical newspaper whose cartoonists were tragically massacred by jihadists earlier this year. A struggling ...
Papa Can’t Buy You A Brand New Earth
In the lullaby “Hush Little Baby,” a singer tries to quiet a child by promising to give her a slew of new things. “Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking bird,” she croons, “And if that mocking bird don’t ...
Why Is Drug Use Forbidden?
If the 20th was the century of the prohibition of drugs, the 21st has every chance to be the century of their liberation. An increasing number of initiatives—state, national, and international—have ...
This is What I Mean When I Tell My Dad He’s Alright
Mattie Wechsler’s essay won the 2014 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award Prize at Bryn Mawr College. When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by ...
Lending an Ear
It’s 2006 in Iowa City. Two women sit at opposite ends of a library table, fingers arched over their keyboards. A moment’s pause, then they begin—an étude on the voice for four hands. The reading ...