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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On Our Nightstands: September
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…
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Knausgaard’s Novel Degree Zero
Proustian epiphanies happen all the time, particularly to children, and they don’t necessarily add up to much.
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On Our Nightstands
Since Public Books launched in 2012 we have published over 200 essays, interviews, and other features, including our annual “Public Picks.” Our editorial staff and contributors work hard to provide readers with thoughtful and interesting pieces, but when the workday is done—what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words,…
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Rereading Edith Wharton
It’s difficult to justify an admiration for Edith Wharton these days. Her fiction has no social conscience; the world she describes is narrow, shallow, and stifling, a world of country homes and Paris fashions, a world in which an unmarried woman’s “reputation” matters more than her personality. Her novels are obsessed with clothes, jewels, furniture,…
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No Man Is an Island
Early on, Andy Weir’s novel The Martian—about an astronaut left to fend for himself on Mars when his team thinks he has died during a crisis—falls into a reliable pattern. Mark Watney, the team’s resourceful botanist and mechanical engineer, encounters an obstacle to his continued survival; he comes up with a clever plan for surmounting…
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One Thousand and One Retellings
Why do people still keep rereading, and retranslating, the Thousand and One Nights? Does its hold have to do with the stories’ strategic positioning between “East” and “West” …
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International Forum on the Novel: Keywords
Every year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to speak on a “keyword” of their choice. The following videos and accompanying text are drawn from this year’s forum, presented by Villa Gillet and Le Monde in partnership with France Inter and Les Subsistances (Lyon). The full list of participating English-language writers and keywords can be found…
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Passing Beauty
How do you break a spell? How do you get over the grief of racial, gendered, and childhood injuries? Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird is not a black-and-white parable but a black-and-blue story. A bruising tale about miscegenation, passing, and beauty, this novel brings to life the idealization and wounding that haunt the American…
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Geoff Dyer’s American Liberation
Geoff Dyer may be the greatest complainer in contemporary literature. It’s a quality of Dyer’s writing that is often noticed but rarely celebrated, the snobbish and insecure voice on the page that’s infectious even when annoying and runs through all his best work. In a way Dyer’s writing exists in its own genre—a genre of…
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Monsieur Zierold’s Guide to Paris
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The typed index card in Fielding’s 1956-57 Travel Guide to Europe smells old, and its edges are yellowed. It is a note, to someone. It is part of Paris on a card. The book’s former owner must have…
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Harmony and Discord
The myth of the inspired musician Orpheus informs some of our most fundamental ideas about the life of the creative artist and performer. Three new novels by Stacey D’Erasmo, Michael Cunningham, and Richard Powers suggest that we can’t stop retelling his story. Orpheus was the first rock star, the archetype of all subsequent sexy, irresistible,…
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The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her lawyer; she is sending him a story, she explains, to help him understand why she wants to change her will.…
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Translating the Untranslatable: An Interview with Barbara Cassin
Barbara Cassin is a French philosopher, translator, and theorist of translation. Trained as a philologist and philosopher specializing in ancient Greece, she is the director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. She is the author, editor, and translator of many books, and for more than a decade she…
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Public Picks 2014
Welcome to the second annual edition of Public Picks, a selection of the books and art that most interested and excited our editorial staff over the past year. As in last year’s Picks, we aimed for a list that combines the best of the best with more idiosyncratic works that you may have missed. With admiring nods to…
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Reading Social Democracy in Translation
It wasn’t so long ago that Scandinavia seemed very far away from London and New York. But steady doses of Dogme films and Ikea furniture over the last decades have prepared the way for a swell in the Anglo-American uptake of Danish television, Nordic noir, high-end Scandinavian design, and more. Such is the increased traffic…
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Notes on a Reading
We asked novelist and Public Books contributor Ellis Avery to tell us about the Public Books event she recently hosted at Three Lives Books in Manhattan’s West Village with Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.…
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The Hope and the Horror
In 1953, a young Jean Franco set sail from Europe for Central America. She arrived in Cuba a few days after Fidel Castro’s ill-fated assault on the Moncada Barracks. Continuing to Guatemala, she witnessed the US-backed military overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s reform government, a coup that placed the country on the road to genocidal oppression.…
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Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
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Queer Magic
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek both use magic to imagine solutions to childhood anxieties: What do you do when your family doesn’t feel like one? What kind of alternate kinship is available to a kid disempowered by age, obedience, and dependence? How might…
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At the Wall
The title of Donna Tartt’s latest best-selling novel comes from a painting of a small bird by Carel Fabritius that hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. A student of Rembrandt’s and an influence on Vermeer, Fabritius had his career cut short by a gunpowder explosion in 1654 that also destroyed almost all of his…
