Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His latest books are The Beneficiary (Duke University Press, 2017), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Duke University Press, 2012), and Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton University Press, 2007). He can be reached at robbins.bruce@gmail.com.
Bruce Robbins
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Writing on Public Books
Tender Gossip: Darryl Pinckney’s “Come Back in September”
Is there a writing life than can safely dispense with categories like identity and commitment, which count so much in how we live now?
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds …
Is That All There Is?
“Is That All There Is?” became a hit for Peggy Lee in August 1969, the month that followed the July 29 moon landing featured so prominently at the end of the first half of Season 7. Though not much time has gone by, the televised Nixon speech that comes later in the episode dates it […]
Unreliable Voices From Europe
The first sentence of the Slovakian writer Balla’s “Before the Breakup,” the opening story in Best European Fiction 2013, goes like this: “Miša discovered there was something in the apartment.” The narrator never describes the something, but it is ominous, attentive, and located behind the television. It is also associated with Miša’s growing unease about […]
Virtual Roundtable on Amy Waldman’sThe Submission
Last fall Public Books sponsored a lively roundtable discussion of Amy Waldman’s widely praised novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which considers what might have happened if the winner of an anonymous architectural design competition for a Ground Zero memorial had been an American Muslim. The novel poses questions about our obligations as […]
Realism with Benefits: Of Zombies and Commuters
What’s ordinary these days in fiction (at least Anglo-American fiction) is the lives and loves of two or three school chums, what happens to them as they wander out into the post-school world, what secrets emerge and how their relationships get rearranged. You’ve seen this pattern recently (think The Sense of an Ending), maybe more […]
