Tag
Science Fiction
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On Our Nightstands: July 2026
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. Nicholas Dames Editor in Chief Frederic…
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Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in 2013, not yet translated into English). Sorokin, the bad boy of Russian letters, is one of the country’s most talked-about writers. His trademark blend…
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Travel Across Time and Genre
Nick Falcott, an English aristocrat fighting in the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, is about to be run through by a French dragoon’s sword when he abruptly blinks out of existence and reappears in the year 2003. The orphaned Julia Percy, languishing in castle Dar under the guardianship of her loathsome cousin Eamon, discovers she…
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Dreaming in the Multiverse
The American Southwest has long been associated with unsavory scientific research, from Manhattan Project nuclear experiments at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the only recently acknowledged Area 51, preferred vacation spot of aliens the universe over. But in American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett’s latest work of speculative fiction, the little town of Wink, New…
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The End of the End of the World
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy may be one of the most significant works of 21st-century literature that you haven’t read. Which is surprising, since the novels have been well reviewed, avidly marketed, and abundantly sold. Yet they have been oddly absent from the radar screens of many who consider themselves aficionados of the contemporary novel. This…
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Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi; with A Letter to the Artist
Public Books is pleased to present our first collaboration with the Lyon-based cultural institute Villa Gillet in connection with their fall Walls and Bridges festival in New York City. From October 9 to 20 the festival will celebrate critical inquiry and performance by French and American thinkers and artists from across the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Public Books is…
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Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ecodisaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). But New York’s iconicity, as a prime example of what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls…
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Animal Studies
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, without turning into a beast. In Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a widow feeling guilty about her husband’s death compares herself to a taxidermy display of stuffed carnivores. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a blonde dream girl fakes her own kidnapping, slaughters her ex-boyfriend in flagrante, and threatens to abort…
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Love Among the Ruins
The action in The Dog Stars, Peter Heller’s first novel, is confined to a small area of postapocalyptic Colorado, nine years after a superflu outbreak has killed off the vast majority—“ninety nine point whatever”—of the human population. Hig, the succinctly named forty-one-year-old protagonist, spends his days in the sky, patrolling the perimeter of his fortified encampment…
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Jinn in the Machine
G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab…
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Boomer Do-Over: Stephen King’s “11/22/63”
Where were you when JFK was assassinated? This is the first of eleven discussion questions appended to the new paperback edition of 11/22/63, Stephen King’s time-travel novel. The questions precede other Book Club Kit features designed to help groups of readers “travel back” to the period: a Q & A with the author, a playlist…
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A Godlike Science
Is there something missing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? One would think that an author’s say over her work’s substance would be final. Yet the novel’s prolific adaptations seem obsessed with filling in the gory details that Shelley avoids. The latest such homage, Frankenstein, by Dave Morris and inkle Studios, reworks Shelley’s text as an interactive…
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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 …
