We may never know what goes on in the rooms where literary prizes are decided, but thanks to data, we know exactly who was there.
Tag: Literary Fiction
Literary Experiments and Black Southern Time Travel with Kiese Laymon
“My reckoning with the Black South was an attempt to give integrity and texture to my belief that I was an Afrikan with a ‘k.’”
“Finding Other Ways to Flow”: The Once and Future Le Guin
“There’s something very solitary in her writing as well. I almost think of it as solitary solidarity.”
Capitalism Alone Is Not the Problem
Eleanor Catton’s "Birnam Wood" is a leftist novel filled with radicals who fail to exemplify their own ideals.
“Ideological Sci-Fi”: A Conversation with Julius Taranto
“When to form political certainties, and when to take political action, are among the central questions the book explores.”
Sublime Neutrality
In contemporary fiction, “literary evil” has been replaced by “neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters”—but what are the consequences of this indifference to evil and the assumed moral neutrality?
On Our Nightstands: September 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
B-Sides: Joyce Carol Oates’s “them”
“‘Them’ remakes the naturalist tradition of novels for a society that seems … incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence.”
“An Extraordinarily Metal Way to Be”: Authorship and Medieval Women
Maybe we have something to learn from their proclivity for the irreconcilable, unruly, and open-ended.
B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy”
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City”
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
B-Sides: Daphne Du Maurier, “Monte Verità”
Few writers have been as beloved by readers and underrated by reviewers as Daphne du Maurier. What irked them?
B-Sides: Haruki Murakami’s “After the Quake”
How, Murakami asks, can community after the earthquake be structured around self-reflection rather than cruelty?
“There Are More Things”: Benjamín Labatut on Betrayal, Fiction, and the Future
“If I’m honest, I never came back to Chile, at least not to the country of my early childhood, an inferno in which I was happy.”
World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022
What can readers learn from five centuries of circumnavigation?
“Once It Is Written, It Is Forgotten”: Kate Zambreno on Hervé Guibert
“So I must begin again, when I only have months left to write it.”
“The Last Samurai,” Unread
“In a world where the imagined purpose of the novel is to entertain—not to teach or spark further inquiry—The Last Samurai dissents.”
“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