Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
Tag: Fiction
A Labyrinth for Our Time
What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound?
How to Build a World
Storytelling like that of Ursula K. Le Guin or Hayao Miyazaki reveals how real-world politics is similarly an act of collective “world building.”
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
Who Killed Nordic Noir?
Scandinavian crime novels once showed how society failed its citizens. Today, the genre innovates differently—by depicting more violence.
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
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 ...
Igiaba Scego on Writing between History and Literature
“I strongly lay claim to imagination, because to us Black women for a long time the possibility of imagination had been negated.”
Reimagining Italy through Black Women’s Eyes
Italy’s past, present, and future are no less marked by race than any other former colonial power. Acknowledging that is only the beginning.
“Soulful, Perhaps Even Magical” Science
Yaa Gyasi’s new novel meditates on the problems we try to solve with science, with faith, and with love.
The DJ Is a Time Machine
Let’s rupture and reject the “timeline,” a flawed and colonial form of teaching history.
Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
E. B. White’s “Plain Style” @75
It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated.
Is American Fiction Too Provincial?
While most American fiction focuses on national concerns, its high-end, prize-winning fiction looks around the globe. Why the divide?
B-Sides: Latife Tekin’s “Berji Kristin”
As in mythology, the characters in a 1984 Turkish novel are acted upon by forces distant and uncaring.
On Our Nightstands: September 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
How to Fake a 19th-Century Novel
If Cloud Atlas is any guide, one of the best ways to sound like a bygone novelist is to make your narrator sound like a racist.
The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” @100
Why did Americans start distrusting small towns? The answer is one book, in which a woman moves from the city—and loses her freedom.
