A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Tag: Memoir
Ditching the “New Yorker” Voice
“What does it mean to self-narrate? What does self-insight look like?”
“No Words”: Refugee Camps and Empathy’s Limits
Empathy will not close the refugee camps, nor will it aid refugees. So what will?
Healing through Ordinary Stories
What Chinese readers consume diverges from what is translated into English. Writers of ordinary life are often left untranslated—until now.
Thy Face Tomorrow
What does it take to live without the ability to smile or move half of one’s face? For that matter, what does it take to live at all?
Brilliant Together: On Feminist Memoirs
Collective feminist narratives can acknowledge, to differing degrees, the stories that are missing from them.
A Dad Cartoonist Travels into Factory Life
The artist comes as a class outsider to the factory, marveling at the complexity of its machinery and the dexterity and dangers of manual labor.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
Dear Knausgaard
“There’s a passage early on in Book 2 that’s so smug, so macho (in a literary way), that’s so—ugh! I can’t explain it.”
The Spy Who Read Me
Women writing about women spies who are, themselves, writing. What’s next for women’s espionage writing?
A Tale of Two Valleys
To understand Silicon Valley, first examine the stories it tells about itself; just like, to understand the Victorian age, first read writers like Dickens and Dreiser.
B-Sides: Brecht Evens’s “The Making Of”
How could any Belgian graphic novel escape Tintin’s shadow? Enter Brecht Evens’s The Making Of.
We Must Heal Each Other
At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s ...
Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican ...
Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to ...
Thailand: The Playwright and the Junta
Everything changed with the May 22, 2014, coup, Thailand’s 12th military takeover since the end of the absolute monarchy, in 1932. This time, a ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...
Another Mormon Education
The first sentence Tara Westover writes in her engrossing memoir Educated is a disclaimer: “This story is not about Mormonism.” This is true in the same ...
Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose ...