Tag
Novel
-
“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
“I had never seen a narrative about an older woman and a younger man that was just a real relationship where they love talking to each other.”
-
A Small, Simple Stone: Looking for Barbara Pym in Oxfordshire
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the summer of ‘14, as my family was planning a trip to England, I learned that I would be missing the annual meeting of the Barbara Pym Society in London. It gave me pleasure to imagine the…
-
Franzen Makes Nice
Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign spies mistakes the protagonist, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, for Kaplan, a fictional decoy created by the CIA. No matter how strenuously Thornhill protests…
-
The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying AK-47s, and to dazzling, often hilarious effect. At…
-
Loving Pickwick
The amorphous literary period that directly preceded Queen Victoria’s ascension to the English throne in 1837 is notorious for true crimes of book history, from the suspicious disappearance of the middle chapters of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript to the regrettable posthumous burning of Lord Byron’s handwritten Memoirs. But these controversies have nothing on the mysterious…
-
Stunt Double: Twice Fallen
The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the French Algerians, derisively called pied-noirs, the flesh-and-blood symbol of French Colonial rule (1830–1956), still haunt the land they fought so viciously to keep…
-
A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has …
-
The Post-Apocalyptic Present
Post-apocalyptic fiction used to be disreputable, a source of pulpy thrills and nuclear terror. Flourishing in the post-World War II period, works like Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) sought to represent the aftermath of some cataclysmic event that wipes out a…
-
Public Picks 2015
Welcome to the third 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 with previous years’ Picks (2013, 2014), we aimed for a list that combines the best of the best with more idiosyncratic works that you may have missed. With admiring…
-
Living Just Enough: New Novels of the City
If you tell a story of the city, rather than merely stage a story there, you lay claim to it, but not always as a fan, a lover, or a life-long insider. Rather, you insist your characters take on the city as a foil or familiar—something powerful with its own memory and will. Recent novels by…
-
Shakespeare Off the Grid
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling symphony doubling as a Shakespeare troupe treks across the postapocalyptic landscape, performing classical music and an Elizabethan repertoire for villages in northern Michigan. While…
-
The Novel’s Forking Path
Reading Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, it suddenly occurred to me why his 2005 novel Remainder is so good. It’s not the reason Zadie Smith gave in the New York Review of Books, however important that …
-
The Marshmallow Test
To the extent that a reviewer’s job involves a summary of plot, Stig Sæterbakken’s Self-Control, in translation from Norwegian, offers little challenge. Andreas Feldt has a conversation with his daughter. He tells her that he is divorcing her mother, a lie, and the daughter, after a momentary shock, seems unmoved. He hosts friends for dinner,…
-
What’s the Matter with Dystopia?
Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power. If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be as common as parking lots, deadly plagues as widespread as the flu, and cannibalism no more unusual than a visit to McDonald’s. Dozens…
-
On Our Nightstands: January
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 in Chief…
-
The Other Side of the Looking Glass
The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an endlessly elusive source text works double duty: it grants a fictional world intertextual legitimacy, while simultaneously opening a void at its center. Andrei Bitov’s latest…
-
What Makes a “True Novel”?
Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is an utterly absorbing love story set against the broad backdrop of pre- and postwar Japan. It tells the story of Taro Azuma, who grows up as an orphan in grinding poverty. As a young child he comes into the orbit of two grand families, the Shigemitsus and the Saegusas,…
-
Give the People WhatThey Want
For Sarah Waters’s novel The Paying Guests, Public Books is simultaneously publishing an original one-panel illustration review by Alison Bechdel, “A Curious Feat of Description,” and a written review by Heather Love, below. Sarah Waters’s new novel, a beautiful account of love and loss in post-WWI London, marks a significant departure from the fantastic, ribald Victorian historical novels she is best…
-
Today’s Stories of Yesterday: Recent Historical Fiction
Contemporary historical fiction occupies virtually every point on the history–fiction spectrum: fictional stories of real-life people; narratives of real-life events experienced by fictional characters; fiction that rewrites novels of the past; and wholly fictional stories that inhabit an otherwise real past. Looking to the entire span of recorded and not-yet-recorded history (think Cloud Atlas), today…
-
Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is a product of social media, while the other is not meant to be read by others. Donald Winnicott, the influential British psychoanalyst of…
-
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…
