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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Naples into Words
In My Brilliant Friend, the fourth and most recent novel by Elena Ferrante to be translated into English, all by Ann Goldstein, Naples provides the absorbing backdrop to the narrator-protagonist Elena Greco’s memories of childhood and adolescence. The first volume of a proposed trilogy, the novel focuses on two young girls growing up in the…
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Marie NDiaye: One Powerful Writer
If you have ever had an uneasy dream in which every word and gesture shimmers with meaning just beyond your grasp, the kind of dream in which the most familiar interactions become strangely entangled in a web of guilt and shame, then you have some sense of what it feels like to read Marie NDiaye.…
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For Now and for Nao
Both of the protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, set out to tell one story and wind up telling another. “Ruth”—like the book’s author a novelist living on an island in …
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A Heike for the Ages
The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), often referred to as Japan’s “epic,” is the subject of a lively new translation by Royall Tyler, the preeminent translator of Japanese classics. A work on par with the early 11th-century Tale of Genji for its national cultural significance, the Heike is an account of the Genpei War…
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Found in Translation: Franco-Belgian Comics in America (Part 1)
I first encountered French-language comics at age twelve while visiting my best friend’s grandparents at their farm in the south of France. There, on an attic shelf, we found a stack of Astérix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke. The books appeared almost talismanic effect to me, not least because, well, they were books. It was 1978,…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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On the Itinerant as Philosopher: An Interview with Aman Sethi
Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, a portrait of a day laborer in modern Delhi, is the latest contribution to an emerging subgenre of creative nonfictional books about Indian cities—itself a subset of a growing fascination with the poetics and practices of the metropolises of the Global South—that includes Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004), Katherine Boo’s…
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Public Picks 2013
Since we launched Public Books twelve months ago more than a hundred essays and reviews have appeared on the site, discussing works in a striking variety of genres and media, and our editors have considered nigh on a thousand candidates for review. It would seem an occasion to look back and take stock. At the…
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
With over 29 million copies sold in trade paperback alone and translations afoot in languages from Arabic to Tagalog, the Fifty Shades trilogy …
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Surviving the City
Once Oprah Winfrey selected Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, for her revamped Book Club, the new author garnered widespread publicity and the book quickly found its place on best-seller lists. Journalists and critics, invoking Isabel Wilkerson’s recent nonfiction book The Warmth of Other Suns, quickly claimed that Mathis’s book was about…
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A World Where We Are All Autistic
On a memorable spring evening in 2002, the philosopher Peter Singer welcomed disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson to speak at Princeton University. The event was controversial, given that Singer had publicly claimed that parents should be allowed to euthanize children with severe disabilities, and that Johnson was herself severely disabled. Born with muscular dystrophy…
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The Confidence Economy: An Interview with T. J. Jackson Lears
Questions about trust, faith, and chance in American cultural history are at the core of your work as I see it. Your interest in confidence and con men is especially striking …
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Another Fistfight in Heaven
By the second page of Sherman Alexie’s newest collection of short stories, Blasphemy, it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to pull any punches. As the narrator of “Cry Cry Cry” observes with reference to his meth-snorting, faux-wisdom-spouting cousin, “Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.” There’s nothing “traditional”…
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Dudes, Bodies, and Criminals
For those accustomed to the dry wit of judicial opinions, there is an undeniable charm to a novel that, within its first ten pages, paraphrases the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona US Supreme Court case with colloquial gusto: “The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never…
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Landscape with Corpses
Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room is a stunning and disturbing novel of and about nightmares. Early on, the protagonist, Elinor Brooke, slashes off her hair in an act of vengeance against her femininity, then falls asleep: “she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention…
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To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire family and village, in an unnamed Muslim country, to an American attack. And one day, writes Dau, “sitting in plastic…
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Animal Studies
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, without turning into a beast. In Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a widow feeling guilty about her husband’s death compares herself to a taxidermy display of stuffed carnivores. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a blonde dream girl fakes her own kidnapping, slaughters her ex-boyfriend in flagrante, and threatens to abort…
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War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via newsreels, books, or folksongs, are now available for immediate consumption anywhere, anytime. But is anyone watching? Recent wars have proven to…
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Hollowgram
Make a left at the corner, head down the road about six miles, make a couple of quick rights, and you’re there: the plant of Thomson-Shore, printer of Dave Eggers’s new novel, A Hologram for the King. At least, that’s where you’ll be if you start out from the spot where I am typing these…
