Tag
Fiction
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Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions: Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann
“I come to the understanding I know nothing, and then I completely throw myself into the research.”
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Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath
“I wanted to make nature a source of conflict, but also a source of joy and beauty and wonder and delight.”
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“We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”: Shehan Karunatilaka and Sangeeta Ray
“Seven Moons” makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka’s long civil war.
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What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award
We may never know what goes on in the rooms where literary prizes are decided, but thanks to data, we know exactly who was there.
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Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch
“How I made the book determined the story that was created … Once you have enough of something, a narrative can emerge.”
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What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
“You need your heroes to have flaws.”
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Capitalism Alone Is Not the Problem
Eleanor Catton’s “Birnam Wood” is a leftist novel filled with radicals who fail to exemplify their own ideals.
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Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling
“Weird fiction is unusual, too, in how the unknown may be both horrific and incredibly beautiful.”
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Sublime Neutrality
In contemporary fiction, “literary evil” has been replaced by “neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters”—but what are the consequences of this indifference to evil and the assumed moral neutrality?
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Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
In the intro to season 6 of Novel Dialogue, Kate Marshall gets weird: “I was looking at writers who were considering themselves part of a new weird, and I wanted to ask what the old weird was, and so I started looking.”
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“Gestures of Refusal”: A Conversation with Sarah Bernstein and Daisy Lafarge
“Why do we want our characters to be innocent, as if we are innocent ourselves?”
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Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
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B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”
“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”
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Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard
“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
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Franzen’s Anger
“Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset.”
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B-Sides: Fran Ross’s Oreo
“Oreo” is not the easiest read, but it is a book that is, in many ways, written against ease.
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The View from the Fiction of the “New Yorker”
America’s premier literary magazine promises to offer a cosmopolitan view of the world beyond New York City. Does it deliver?
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Many into One, One into Many: George Lamming (1927–2022)
Lamming never lets readers forget that within that one man—as within all of us—is a boiling multitude.
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On Our Nightstands: May 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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A Woman’s Working-Class Experimentalism
Where do working-class women who are literary and experimental find, first, their models, and next, their readership?
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McCarthy’s Perpetual Motion Scam
Tom McCarthy hasn’t evaded the literary brand: if you continually say nothing, “saying nothing” becomes what you, the novelist, say.
