Tag
Literature in Translation
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Literature in the Time of Suicide
“In both these Spanish-language novels, thinking about suicide is not only to grapple with someone else’s decision to die, but also inevitably with one’s own decision to go on living.”
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Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico
“I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident.”
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On Our Nightstands: September 2025
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
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“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
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“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism
“Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.
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We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí…
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The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing?
Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?
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On Our Nightstands: March 2025
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
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Proust Curious: Beyond the “Recherche”
À la recherche du temps perdu has its place in literary culture partly because it has influenced generations of writers.
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“Only the Northern Lights”: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Its Poets
These poets unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.
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Modes of Witness: On “The Singularity” and “The Simple Art of Killing a Woman”
Despite their opposing answers to the question—what to do with the grief of witnessing?—both novels lead us up and back down the long, winding road of grief and witness.
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Lahiri’s Metamorphoses
Over eight years have passed since Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to leave behind the terrain of English letters and write only in Italian.
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Phantoms of Patriarchy: On Ditlevsen & Bachmann
Revival fetishism perpetuates the gendered dynamics of authorship and reception that Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann spent their lives writing about and against.
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A #MeToo Novel That Must Be Read #WithYou
A South Korean novel critiques violent misogyny within a literature department. Remarkably, it does so by addressing the reader directly.
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Cristina Rivera Garza: “the traces that shelter us”
One novelist spotlights an object, feeling, or sensation where the relay between past and present, or present and future, becomes visible.
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Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
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“Tomb of Sand” Brings Hindi Literature to the World
Despite the fact that Hindi is the language of more than 400 million people, Hindi fiction is rarely translated.
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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?
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Growing Up in the World Made by Femicide
A dystopian buddy story shows misogynist violence emerging spontaneously—almost casually—from male camaraderie, from ennui, from dipshit youth.
