Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, most recently the novel Everything Is Borrowed (New Door, 2018), and coeditor of an anthology, Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018). He is the prose review editor of Cleaver Magazine.
Nathaniel Popkin
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Writing on Public Books
“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks enter […]
The Rubble of Beirut
Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s latest novel to be translated into English, Broken Mirrors, is about identity and memory, destruction and displacement, exile and its internal ruptures. The book opens …
Past and Future Both Color the Present
How to Be Both, the sixth novel by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, is an astounding work of art, so exquisite in its composition that reading it feels like staring into a Decadent painting, bound and endless all at once. This feeling is both the product of the book’s composition and simultaneously its silky essence. […]
Shallow Botany
A birth is a fine way to begin a novel, so it is not in itself a bad sign that Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, The Signature of All Things, opens with the delivery of its protagonist, Alma Whittaker. The scene echoes Gilbert’s earlier novel, Stern Men (2000), which also began with the birth of a […]
