Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
Tag: Knopf
On Our Nightstands: April 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
The Necessity of an Alternative
Margaret Thatcher made her notorious claim that there is “no such thing as society” in an interview with Women’s Own magazine published in ...
Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...
The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an ...
The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an ...
On Our Nightstands: September 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who ...
Summer Reads: Pan-African Literature
To celebrate Africa Day, May 25, Zimbabwean information project Kubatana curated its top-10 titles from Exclusive Books’ Pan-African Writing ...
Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...
The Great Global Grad School Novel
Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to ...
Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne ...
The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...
The Great Global Grad School Novel
Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to ...
We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer ...
Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne ...
B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now ...
Beautiful Games?
In the early ’90s, cable TV reached the Vermont woods. The wire running up our dirt road brought MTV, C-SPAN, and a regional station called the New England Sports Network (NESN), which aired ...
