Tag
Essays
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On Our Nightstands: September 2025
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
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Who Gets to Be a Jewish Writer?
“The term ‘Jewish writer,’” argues Cynthia Ozick, “ought to be an oxymoron.” Yet 82 years earlier, in 1924, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva proclaimed that “in …
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What Essays Are, and What Essayists Do
There are no good books about essays, only essays. The first practitioner of the form, the 16th-century French politician and minor aristocrat Michel de …
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Live Theory: An Interview with Tom McCarthy
“It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.” This is the final sentence of …
