Tag
Literature
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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Living Just Enough: New Novels of the City
If you tell a story of the city, rather than merely stage a story there, you lay claim to it, but not always as a fan, a lover, or a life-long insider. Rather, you insist your characters take on the city as a foil or familiar—something powerful with its own memory and will. Recent novels by…
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Shakespeare Off the Grid
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling symphony doubling as a Shakespeare troupe treks across the postapocalyptic landscape, performing classical music and an Elizabethan repertoire for villages in northern Michigan. While…
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Murderous Schoolgirls
While little girls may be made of sugar and spice and everything nice, in fiction the teenagers they grow into are anything but. We are drawn to stories where girls are scandalous, promiscuous, and even—or especially—murderous, where a sinister drive emerges from beneath facades of propriety and innocence. The dark underbelly of female adolescence and…
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The Novel’s Forking Path
Reading Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, it suddenly occurred to me why his 2005 novel Remainder is so good. It’s not the reason Zadie Smith gave in the New York Review of Books, however important that …
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On The Horizon
“On The Horizon” is a new quarterly feature from Public Books that looks forward to the coming season’s notable events—literary and artistic, intellectual and pop-cultural—in and around New York City. FILM & TELEVISION Film About Elly at Film Forum, April 8–21 From director Asghar Farhadi comes this mystery-thriller, set among a group of Iranian college…
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On Pansodan Road: The Second-Hand Books of Yangon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Some names in this piece have been changed to protect privacy. It’s a Sunday morning, and the light first falls on the squatters who have built their homes on the roof of the colonial telegraph building, an edifice…
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To Translate Is to Betray: On the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon in Italy and the US
The stunning fortunes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in the United States have only recently begun to affect their reception in the author’s native country, giving rise to competing theories and occasionally ugly polemics: Are Italians simply unable to recognize greatness in one of their own? Are American readers uncritically falling for sentimental “women’s” novels?…
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On Our Nightstands: March
Here at Public Books our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with compelling, thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a new behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. CAITLIN ZALOOM Editor in Chief…
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Drone Poems
The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box with propellers. I heard a moment’s nervous murmuring from the crowd each time it went up. But the drone’s LEDs were swirling red…
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Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he coined—would soon colonize our imaginations and daily experiences. Despite his ambivalent representations of technological change, his work became something of a guiding vision not only for…
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Marlon James’s Savage Business
The irony in the title of Marlon James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is twofold. For one, this 686-page book is far from brief. On the contrary, it is a raucous, nearly …
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Murakami on Friendship
It might be fair to say that Haruki Murakami has had two narrative modes in his novels and short stories. Works like Norwegian Wood (1987) illustrate his “normal” mode, in which he recounts a nostalgic, affecting tale of relationship and loss. In his “weird” mode—weird in the eerie, old-fashioned sense—he gives us talking animals and…
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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On Our Nightstands: February
Here at Public Books our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with compelling, thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a new behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. SHARON MARCUS Editor in Chief…
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The Marshmallow Test
To the extent that a reviewer’s job involves a summary of plot, Stig Sæterbakken’s Self-Control, in translation from Norwegian, offers little challenge. Andreas Feldt has a conversation with his daughter. He tells her that he is divorcing her mother, a lie, and the daughter, after a momentary shock, seems unmoved. He hosts friends for dinner,…
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Norwegian Autofiction and the Problem of Kinship
It’s a dark and wet December afternoon in downtown Copenhagen; the appeal of venturing out to listen to Norway’s latest literary star isn’t obvious. But a small collection of people are nonetheless now shaking the rain from their jackets and sitting down in the “LiteraturHaus” to hear Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold talk with her Danish translator,…
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Race: Past, Present, and Future Tense
“White culture has been on the fritz lately and I’m not sure it is coming back.” So wrote one of my undergraduate students on her final exam a few years back. I remember laughing out loud at the time, but her pithy sentence stuck with me. Somehow, that image of white culture as a broken-down…
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Weekend Reading: Memory Lane
One day we won’t be covered in snow. But not just yet, it seems. While we wait, here’s your weekend reading. NBC’s Brian Williams has found himself in hot water over his account of being shot at while flying in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003, which, apparently, never happened. That, in turn, has brought…
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Of Clouds and Clocks: The Fiction of David Mitchell
All fiction plays with the tension between freedom and necessity—that is part of what it means to be fiction—but David Mitchell’s fiction plays with it more ostentatiously than most. To what degree do we act of our own volition, to what degree are we just characters in someone else’s story? That is one of the…
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What’s the Matter with Dystopia?
Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power. If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be as common as parking lots, deadly plagues as widespread as the flu, and cannibalism no more unusual than a visit to McDonald’s. Dozens…
