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Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Public Picks 2025
What were the books of 2025 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?
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On Our Nightstands: July 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage’s concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
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On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Greenwell’s “Cleanness”: From Debt to Care
Garth Greenwell challenges readers to see how sex—especially for queer people—might be an act of difficult but healing care.
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Safe at Home in Late Capitalism
Baseball is ideal for explaining American economic precarity: the players try desperately to get home safe, but almost always fail to do so.
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Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
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A Man in Brussels
Storytelling about the European Union tends to be done by those aggressively disinterested in its survival. Isn’t that a problem?
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On Our Nightstands: April 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
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We Must Heal Each Other
At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s now regularly used as shorthand for celebrity beauty routines. Meanwhile, corporate elites promote self-care among employees in hopes of cutting their losses in…
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Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against …
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Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge …
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Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential reproductive power of women was brought under men’s control.1 Three decades after Rich’s analysis, it remains so. Every day brings new reports of violence carried out in…
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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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Translators and Other Icons
Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists …
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The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it out. In 1856, a London newspaper called the Examiner insisted that “wherever there are Europeans, no matter whether officials, merchants, or missionaries,…
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On Our Nightstands: January 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is …
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Digital Lies, Real Ghosts
We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the conjurors of our own ghosts. Andrew O’Hagan is different. The British journalist’s third work of nonfiction, The Secret Life, collects three previously…
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B-Sides: “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’”
On November 26, 1893, a 13-year-old Anglo-Brazilian girl opens her diary to record a rescue mission. Helena’s father, a diamond miner in Diamantina, in …
