Category
Essays
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The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
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Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
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Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim
The Carrie Mae Weems retrospective cries out for the spiral at the Guggenheim. But instead 30 years of work, asking bigger and bigger questions, is split across two side galleries two floors apart, while the Italian Futurists bluster their way up the curved ramp. On the lower level are Weems’s family pictures from 1978–1984, their…
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Notes on a Reading
We asked novelist and Public Books contributor Ellis Avery to tell us about the Public Books event she recently hosted at Three Lives Books in Manhattan’s West Village with Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.…
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Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac
In the New Republic, Eric Sasson centers his review of Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac on the belief that “[o]ne can’t make a movie about nymphomania and not have it be about female sexuality.” While this more or less may be true, it is no less true that a movie entitled Nymph()maniac need not be concerned (primarily)…
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Video from Panel Discussion with Thomas Piketty
On April 17, 2014, in New York City, Public Books and the Institute for Public Knowledge hosted a panel conversation with Thomas Piketty, Julia Ott, David Stasavage, and Frédéric Viguier on Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the…
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That Silver Building on Powers
East Williamsburg is fast becoming one of the most dramatically gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with glass-fronted condo buildings shooting up in their narrow lots like beanstalks in a developer’s fairy tale. It also continues to be one of the ugliest. The problem with the area’s housing stock may be vivid to anyone who has read…
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Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
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Humans and Other Animals
Toward the end of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2013), an elderly mother and her daughter enjoy fast-melting ice cream bars while returning from their pilgrimage to a hilltop temple in rural Nepal. “We’re like children still learning how to eat,” the younger woman comments, as much to her mother as to the camera.…
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On Christopher Street Pier
This is the inaugural installment of Public Streets, a series of observations on urban life curated by the novelist Ellis Avery. I’ve seen that child before, a boy of 10 or 12 in suspenders and a newsboy cap. He plays the cello. He rides a unicycle. Once I saw him in a sycamore in Abingdon…
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Michael Nyman At 70
When asked to name a “minimalist” composer, most would say Philip Glass. Steve Reich, John Adams, and Terry Riley resonate with those a bit more familiar with classical music. Yet few know that it was the English composer Michael Nyman who coined the term in a 1968 piece he wrote while working as a music critic and…
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Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with…
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Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable for its wide-ranging social interests as well as its commitment to the limits of documentary form. “So much that defines documentary today is about the…
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Welcome to the Public Books Blog
Since we began Public Books in June 2012, we’ve often found ourselves wanting to publish pieces that, for reasons of length, timeliness, or subject matter, fall outside the scope of our biweekly book reviews. In our new blog, we’re looking forward to bringing you news and updates from our contributors, short reviews of what’s happening…
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Changes
The first thing that happens, when a literary historian starts using computers to think about literature, is that the object of study changes. Not just the tool; the object itself. “The objects studied by contemporary historians” have this peculiarity, Krzysztof Pomian observed some time ago, that “no one has ever seen them, and no one…
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The Restless Storyteller: An Interview With Laura Bolaños Cadena
Historia Semanal de Amor y Pasión (Weekly Story of Love and Passion) is one of those pocket-size Mexican comic books you may have read or seen—they’re called historietas. The covers are illustrated in eye-popping colors, and the drama inside is high and often fast. One of the most twisty and gripping issues I’ve read contained…
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Translation: Oneself As Another
As part of our co-sponsorship of Villa Gillet’s Walls and Bridges festival, we are pleased to publish the following brief declaration of principles by the French writer and translator Frédéric Boyer. On Friday, October 18, Boyer will deliver a keynote address at the mini-conference “Found in Translation,” an event celebrating the publication of In Translation: Translators on…
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Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Times of India, and the New Statesman. His first novel, The Impressionist (2002), which won the Betty Trask Prize,…
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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…
