Tag
Memoir
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“My Starting Point Was Wrong”: Talking with Gil Hochberg about Writing, Mental Illness and Queer Survival
“He was ill independently of course; but nationally, a psychotic illness was brewing.”
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Ada Ferrer on “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter”
“People are buffeted byhistory sometimes in ways that they don’t realize. Ourfamily was buffeted by these forces that were much greater than us.”
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“Parallel Tracks”: Sophie Ratcliffe on Academia, Memoirs, and Motherhood
“I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore.”
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“How a Fire Builds”: Talking with Nina St. Pierre about Mental Illness, Art, and Survival
“In grad school, I’d had this wacky drunken idea that the book had to be meta to be proper.”
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Jamie Figueroa on “Mother Island”
“The greatest way to honor another is with this intense complexity of truth, of love, of forgiving.”
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The Writing “I” and the Reading “I”: Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.
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Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty
“It’s still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing anything at all what they’re about to write.”
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“We Were Not That Band”—But What Was Sonic Youth?
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore’s memoir may tell us about his life. But he doesn’t give us much insight into the band they were.
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A Hole at the Bottom of the Book
For the writers Annie Ernaux and Hilary Plum, a paradox emerges with each new book: writing attempts “carry to completion” something lived, but also changes the original experience.
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On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”
“We are obliged to acknowledge what we see and how we organize what we see.”
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Heal Thyself?
How do current social and political arrangements limit our opportunities for feeling better?
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras on “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”
“I realized that if I was going to write a story about healers, I also had to write a story about healing.”
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“If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It”: Ander Monson on “Predator” and the Monster of American Masculinity
“I see actual male friendship, in a way that I don’t in almost any other action movie from the 80s.”
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Saying Goodbye to Childhood: An Interview with Javier Zamora
“I hope people will see the heartbreak of a little kid having to grow up and say goodbye to his childhood in order to survive.”
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Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
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Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
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On Our Nightstands: September 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Can You Feel It? “Happening” and Sensory Cinema
A new film centers on a young, unmarried woman’s attempts to secure an abortion—over a decade before France legalized the practice in 1973.
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On Our Nightstands: July 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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My Mother’s Book, My Grandmother’s Life
“I always thought that the challenge of writing my grandmother’s story was capturing her singular voice. Rereading her emails, I remember why.”
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On Our Nightstands: May 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
