“I realized that if I was going to write a story about healers, I also had to write a story about healing.”
Tag: Memoir
“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.”
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.”
Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
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.”
On Our Nightstands: September 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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.
On Our Nightstands: July 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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.”
On Our Nightstands: May 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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.