“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.”
Tag: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Into the Woods with Yiyun Li
Fairy tales—like Li’s Book of Goose—are so scary because there is no cushion between you and the will of the world, no room for mistakes.
Freedom’s Stakes
Postwar culture was divided between “freedom” and “totalitarianism.” Or was it?
Poe: America’s “Artificer”
Many view Edgar Allen Poe as a uniquely gloomy, mad writer. But what if Poe was normal, simply representative of a gloomy, mad era?
Desire Can Pierce Politics: Amia Srinivasan on Sex, Consent, and Feminism
“Given the long, tainted history of sex under patriarchy, maybe we need reparative norms around sex.”
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.
A Collapse No One Story Can Tell
Ten years since the 2011 Syrian uprising, there has been a veritable literary boom of fiction writing from Syria. What does it reveal?
Public Picks 2021
Each May we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year (or so).
Writers: Know Thyself in Excess
Why read MFA-trained writers writing about writers training in MFA programs?
Shirley Hazzard, Poet of Aftermath
Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
On Our Nightstands: February 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Who Killed Nordic Noir?
Scandinavian crime novels once showed how society failed its citizens. Today, the genre innovates differently—by depicting more violence.
On Our Nightstands: September 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
On Our Nightstands: July 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
A Man in Brussels
Storytelling about the European Union tends to be done by those aggressively disinterested in its survival. Isn’t that a problem?