Tag
Novel
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Mirta Ojito on “Deeper than the Ocean”
“I gave her my love for Spain, and particularly the north of Spain, and particularly the city of Santander. And I gave her my fears. I too, fear the ocean.”
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Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds
“There is a kind of moment of doom when you commit to a character. Because none of my characters are lovely.”
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“The Past Survives in the Telling”: Eight Questions for Esther Kinsky
“I never look for inspiration when I embark on a project. My writing evolves from something I’ve seen, heard outside—never from reading.”
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The Revolution Will Be Caring
What makes something mutual aid or collective care and not capitalist charity?
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Making Fascism Work for Moderates
“The Southern Poverty Law Center describes The Camp of the Saints as ‘the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US.’”
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Groff and the Radical Act of Paying Attention
“I had read Groff all wrong, subjecting her to a sexist and dismissive logic.”
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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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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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Literary Experiments and Black Southern Time Travel with Kiese Laymon
“My reckoning with the Black South was an attempt to give integrity and texture to my belief that I was an Afrikan with a ‘k.’”
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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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“Ideological Sci-Fi”: A Conversation with Julius Taranto
“When to form political certainties, and when to take political action, are among the central questions the book explores.”
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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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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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B-Sides: Neil M. Gunn’s “Highland River”
Freud taught that childhoods shape our adult selves with unresolved trauma. But this novel shows that childhood joy can shape adulthood, too.
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On Our Nightstands: May 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Crossing “The Tartar Steppe”: A New Buzzati
Did this 1940 novel use symbolism not for aesthetic purposes, but, instead, to conceal its critique of Italian fascism from the regime’s censors?
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Growing Up in the World Made by Femicide
A dystopian buddy story shows misogynist violence emerging spontaneously—almost casually—from male camaraderie, from ennui, from dipshit youth.
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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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We Have This-ness Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
