Yaa Gyasi’s new novel meditates on the problems we try to solve with science, with faith, and with love.
Tag: Fiction
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.
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We're in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”
B-Sides: Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters”
A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
Rather than try to kill his literary parents, Eugenides embraces as many of them as possible.
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Both left and right employ “speculative nonfiction” to imagine the world after climate change. But who will win the battle of the futurists?
B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
It’s Your Turn to (Re)Write the Story
How can experimental fiction help to democratize storytelling?
The Worst of All Possible Worlds?
The most interesting science fiction is not about the future at all but about the present.
Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
