B-Sides Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/pbseries/b-sides/ a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:38:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.publicbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/cropped-favicon-2-300x300.png B-Sides Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/pbseries/b-sides/ 32 32 B-Sides: J. L. Carr’s “A Month in the Country” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-j-l-carrs-a-month-in-the-country/ Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:00:55 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=61129 The impact of the novel’s silences and enigmas is amplified by the enigma that is Carr himself.

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]]> Arendt’s Refugee Politics https://www.publicbooks.org/arendts-refugee-politics/ Wed, 05 Nov 2025 14:53:29 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=61054 One of Arendt’s most surprising insights is that professing “love for the X people” may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing “hatred for the Y people.”

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]]> B-Sides: Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-rebecca-wests-the-fountain-overflows/ Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:39:03 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=61049 Do you find child narrators–their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices–endlessly absorbing?

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]]> B-Sides: Leonard Woolf’s “The Village in the Jungle” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-leonard-woolfs-the-village-in-the-jungle/ Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:00:30 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=60940 As in Conrad, even when characters think they understand the dynamics of Leonard Woolf’s jungle, they really don’t.

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]]> B-Sides: Stendhal’s “Love” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-stendhals-love/ Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:30:07 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=60618 Are you a banker or a manufacturer or an industrialist? If so, Stendhal doesn’t want you to read “Love”; you wouldn’t understand.

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]]> B-Sides: Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-anita-looss-gentlemen-prefer-blondes/ Thu, 05 Jun 2025 15:00:24 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=59753 Lorelei accelerates the world around her. It is foolish to try to settle accounts while in her orbit. This is a problem for not only bookkeeping but also psychoanalysis.

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]]> “Lying in Politics”: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair https://www.publicbooks.org/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendts-antidote-to-anticipatory-despair/ Wed, 21 May 2025 15:00:52 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=59703 Four months in, the new Trump administration is already moving from self-deception and deception on to “image making” and “ideologizing”; it is fast approaching complete “defactualization.”

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]]> B-Sides: Percival Everett’s “Wounded” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-percival-everetts-wounded/ Tue, 13 May 2025 15:00:36 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=59740 “Wounded,” by shutting down fictions of escape, shows readers the struggle for safety is a shared one.

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]]> B-Sides: “Under the Sea-Wind” by Rachel Carson https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-under-the-sea-wind-by-rachel-carson/ Thu, 13 Mar 2025 15:00:55 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=59075 Bill McKibben proclaimed nature’s demise in 1989. But Americans who cared about DDT’s poisonous effect and the extinctions that would follow had been warned almost three decades earlier. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) famously opens by imagining a world denuded of plant and animal life. In fact, it wasn’t only Americans Carson managed to terrify. […]

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]]> B-Sides: Menander’s “Dyskolos” https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-menanders-dyskolos/ Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:00:46 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=59027 The arc of any romantic comedy remains incomplete until the misanthrope is brought into the fold of society.

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