“In a world where the imagined purpose of the novel is to entertain—not to teach or spark further inquiry—The Last Samurai dissents.”
Tag: Literary Fiction
“The Breath of Life”: Sheila Heti on Art, Loss, and Immortality
“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.”
Reading by Translating: Ann Goldstein Talks with Saskia Ziolkowski
Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
Reading “Lote”
Shola von Reinhold’s novel is central to any reckoning with the politics of the archive, not to mention contemporary literature itself.
Futures of Postimperial Glasgow
Britain’s “Second City” profited from shipbuilding and the slave trade, but has slowly declined for decades. What should Glasgow’s future hold?
“Our Lives Are at Stake”: Elaine Hsieh Chou on the Necessity of Asian American Writers
“Somehow, we are so present, and yet not even there. That surreal juxtaposition really pissed me off and fascinated me.”
Can You Feel It? “Happening” and Sensory Cinema
A new film centers on a young, unmarried woman’s attempts to secure an abortion—over a decade before France legalized the practice in 1973.
A Woman’s Working-Class Experimentalism
Where do working-class women who are literary and experimental find, first, their models, and next, their readership?
Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
McCarthy’s Perpetual Motion Scam
Tom McCarthy hasn’t evaded the literary brand: if you continually say nothing, “saying nothing” becomes what you, the novelist, say.
B-Sides: Lucy R. Lippard’s “I See/You Mean”
“Few libraries list it among their holdings, and sometimes I have wondered if the book in my possession actually exists.”
Subaquatic Homesick Blues
A Taiwanese scifi novel—set under the sea, after the surface becomes unlivable—reveals the remarkable burst of cultural freedom in 1990s Taiwan.
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?
My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion
Ann Quin is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits.
On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.
On Our Nightstands: July 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
A Messy Utopia Is All We Might Get
Climate change didn’t just wreck the planet; it closed off and reshaped the future. Even utopia—if we reach it—will be a mess.
The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.