Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...
Tag: Rereading
The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...
“The Sandman” @200
In 1816, only four years after the Brothers Grimm brought out a collection of fairy tales carefully selected and edited for the use of children, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his “Nutcracker and Mouse ...
Around the World in 13 Reviews
Whether you’re traveling this summer or just in the mood for some armchair tourism, here are 13 reviews to fuel your cosmopolitan curiosity ...
Austen’s Bodies
Walking back from seeing Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished epistolary novella Lady Susan, I passed a bus stop with a Fiat advertisement on it: ...
Shakespeare in 2016
Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of ...
Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By all means, celebrate the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by rereading or finally reading the novel and its sequel ...
Rereading Walden
Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is ...
Autobibliography
What is reading, especially novel reading, for? What does it mean to love a book or to love reading? These questions hover over the pages of recent bibliomemoirs or autobibliographies that return to ...
On Our Nightstands
Since Public Books launched in 2012 we have published over 200 essays, interviews, and other features, including our annual “Public Picks.” Our editorial staff and contributors work hard to provide ...
Rereading Edith Wharton
It’s difficult to justify an admiration for Edith Wharton these days. Her fiction has no social conscience; the world she describes is narrow, shallow, and stifling, a world of country homes and ...
Feeling like a Stoic: Doris Lessing’s Experimental Fiction
I came late to Doris Lessing. Although it was back in 1962 that The Golden Notebook established her as the Cassandra of a not-quite-revolutionary generation, I clued ...
How Did Susan Sontag Get to be So Famous?
In our time, how many American critics have been celebrities? How many have had the kind of name recognition that allows them to be casually mentioned in a mainstream Hollywood movie, or enough star ...