Tag
Little Brown
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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman
“You want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space? Go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. I say it’s equally as hard.”
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Mother of a Pandemic
If there is a way forward for the “pandemic novel,” it may be in Emma Donoghue’s claustrophobic settings of motherhood and childbirth.
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Women’s Ways of Aging
Studying human evolution reveals that older women have always been essential to the surviving and thriving of the species.
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Madeline Miller on “Circe,” Mythological Realism, and Literary Correctives
Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia. Her degrees include a BA and … [none-for-homepage]
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Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of Public Picks, we’ve asked our editors for the Public Thinker series, Literary Fiction, Higher Education, Children’s & Young Adult Literature,…
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The Return of Homer’s Women
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe speak the lost and muted voices of ancient Greek women …
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Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that …
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Let Us Now See Climate Change
How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate …
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What Can Millennials Teach Us about the University?
Perhaps more fragile and contested than ever before, the university today feels …
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Unsex the Lab
Kit Owens, the protagonist of Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand, is a postdoc in the research lab of academic rock star Dr. Lena Severin; Severin has just received a prestigious research grant when Kit’s …
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Birth of a Mother
What exactly is motherhood? I’ve been mulling it over the past few months, during which time I again experienced pregnancy and childbirth, and again dealt with the confusion and sleep deprivation that attend the motherhood of early infancy. I agreed to write something for Public Books during my last trimester, a period that, this time,…
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Turning Kids into Capital
One of my pet peeves is when I hear a colleague refer to our students as “kids.” They’re not: they are younger than us, sure, but they are still adults who can go to war, operate giant metal boxes on wheels, make all sorts of weighty decisions, acquire disciplinary knowledge and expertise, and work for…
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“The Shape of Power Is Always the Same”
What does your dream of female empowerment look like? You may have wistfully imagined that such a situation would result in more empathetic politics …
