Tag
New Directions
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Public Picks 2025
What were the books of 2025 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?
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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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On Our Nightstands: July 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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This Review Should Not Exist
Latin American authors must defer to “Latin America”—as imagined by centers of literary power—to be translated, to sell, to make money.
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When the Vibe Is Off
Which matters more, intent or interpretation? What if a juxtaposition of images in literature or art is just that—a chance encounter?
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B-Sides: John Keene’s “Annotations”
Annotations isn’t a book you read for the plot. It’s more of a “Notes toward…” that remains just that: always towards, never quite arriving.
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On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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B-Sides: Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”
Impossible to summarize, The Last Samurai is deeply political—anti-capitalist and thoroughly feminist—without ever becoming preachy or moralizing.
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The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.
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What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
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Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
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Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
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Dirty Essays, Clean Essays
Recently translated essay collections underscore how sanitized ethical language has become in the last 60 to 70 years.
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Public Picks 2020
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
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Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
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Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
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Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
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The Kleist We Need
Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
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Helen of West Hollywood
It hardly seems necessary to offer a spoiler alert for news that is well over two millennia old. But some news is so surprising, so contrary to everything we thought we knew, that time can do little …
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On Our Nightstands: June 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 …
