All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century ...
Tag: Literature
Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against ...
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 ...
Machines Like Me, but They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve ...
Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
TV’s Golden Age of Female Serial Killers
Female killers are all the rage in literature and television. My Sister, the Serial Killer, for example, has caused a stir in the literary world. Killing Eve boasts a large ...
Temporal Lines
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Temporal Lines: An Interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez,” by ...
Digging up Whiteness
We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and ...
B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included ...
What If Keats Had Lived?
What if John Keats—the brilliant Romantic poet, whose revolutionary lyrics blended classical myth and sensuous imagery—hadn’t died at age 25? The Warm South, a new novel by Paul Kerschen, reimagines ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASAP 2019
This year the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) convention was held at the University of Maryland, College Park. The hotel bar may have ...
“Down the Rabbit Hole of America”: Katha Pollitt Talks with Susan Jane Gilman
Susan Jane Gilman is a storyteller with a lot to say—about life in our unequal and bewildering America, about refugees, about what happens to youthful ambition ...
Translation and Other Children: Liberaki’s “Three Summers”
While metaphors linking translation to human reproduction abound, Karen ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
The South According to Coetzee
Readers waiting expectantly for the third novel in J. M. Coetzee’s late trilogy, following The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, were in for a ...
Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art ...
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
John Kennedy Toole @50
Thelma Toole, the mother of the novelist John Kennedy Toole—author of the extraordinary almost-unpublished novel A Confederacy of Dunces—delivered one of the most irresponsible accusations in ...
Who Cares about Literary Prizes?
Earlier this morning, the Booker Prize judges announced their shortlist for 2019, stamping just six novels—out of the ...
