Tag
Rereading
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From Slate to Silicon?
Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony …
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Shakespeare in 2016
Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It’s also a year forged in the aftermath of ISIS attacks in Brussels and Paris, Richard Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood center…
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Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By all means, celebrate the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by rereading or finally reading the novel and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872). But do also mark the occasion by picking up Gregory Maguire’s new novel After Alice, a distinctly 21st-century homage to…
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Rereading Walden
Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is …
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Autobibliography
What is reading, especially novel reading, for? What does it mean to love a book or to love reading? These questions hover over the pages of recent bibliomemoirs or autobibliographies that return to formative scenes of reading (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch); recount “the serious pleasure of books,” as the subtitle of Wendy Lesser’s…
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On Our Nightstands
Since Public Books launched in 2012 we have published over 200 essays, interviews, and other features, including our annual “Public Picks.” Our editorial staff and contributors work hard to provide readers with thoughtful and interesting pieces, but when the workday is done—what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words,…
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Rereading Edith Wharton
It’s difficult to justify an admiration for Edith Wharton these days. Her fiction has no social conscience; the world she describes is narrow, shallow, and stifling, a world of country homes and Paris fashions, a world in which an unmarried woman’s “reputation” matters more than her personality. Her novels are obsessed with clothes, jewels, furniture,…
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Feeling like a Stoic: Doris Lessing’s Experimental Fiction
I came late to Doris Lessing. Although it was back in 1962 that The Golden Notebook established her as the Cassandra of a not-quite-revolutionary generation, I clued …
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How Did Susan Sontag Get to be So Famous?
In our time, how many American critics have been celebrities? How many have had the kind of name recognition that allows them to be casually mentioned in a mainstream Hollywood movie, or enough star power to be featured (along with their apartments) in People, the magazine which pretty much invented today’s celebrity culture? Not many.…
