When did we all become so empowered, passionate, and self-enterprising?
Tag: Language
Crossing “The Tartar Steppe”: A New Buzzati
Did this 1940 novel use symbolism not for aesthetic purposes, but, instead, to conceal its critique of Italian fascism from the regime’s censors?
“The Good of the Whole”: Talking Weaving, Coding, and Indigenous Scholarship with Rhiannon Sorrell
”When you work here, you work in the interest of the people in the community, not just your own personal goals.”
Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
“Between the Experiment and the Essence”: Emma Ramadan Talks Translation
“For those of us who can feel unsettled in terms of identity, translation can feel like home.”
Humanities: Let the Hypothesis Testing Begin
The humanities have a replication crisis of monumental proportions: so many theories have never been adequately tested or validated.
Lyn Hejinian’s “Allegorical Activism”
The revelrous, rebellious writing of Hejinian—arguably our foremost poet-critic—works against our sense of psychological and political isolation.
How Words Lead to Justice
What words politicians say matters. But which words they use is often the result not of individual choices, but of collective action over years.
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."
Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
The Hipster
It happens every year. Besides the “Best of” lists that heave into view as early as late November, there are the conspicuous “Worst of” lists. Contrary to their tone, these lists also itemize the ...
Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge ...
Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...
Trump’s “Radio Machete”
This year, Rwanda commemorates the 25th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi. Americans would do well to consider the sobering similarities between the Rwandan “hate radio,” or “Radio ...
Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously ...
The Book That Made Me: Multilingual
Speaking German alongside Spanish seemed as natural as placing scones next to the teapot on the table at teatime …
Signs of Bombay
In December 2016, Public Books Editor in Chief Sharon Marcus spent a few days in Mumbai, participating in the Times of India Literary Festival and walking around the city. Mumbai, also known as ...