Tag
Literary Fiction
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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman
“You want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space? Go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. I say it’s equally as hard.”
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Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music?
Classical music’s most troubling traditions include erasing Black performers, abusing and harassing in conservatories, and refusing to acknowledge physical injuries.
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B-Sides: Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows”
Do you find child narrators–their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices–endlessly absorbing?
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The Past as a Site of Radical Otherness in Nishant Batsha’s “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart”
“I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story.”
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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B-Sides: Stendhal’s “Love”
Are you a banker or a manufacturer or an industrialist? If so, Stendhal doesn’t want you to read “Love”; you wouldn’t understand.
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Mute Compulsion
The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals “The Guest.”
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J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable
What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?
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“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
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The Scenery of the Crime
Opera demands a generous sense of the preposterous. So too does the mystery novel.
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After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
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B-Sides: Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”
Lorelei accelerates the world around her. It is foolish to try to settle accounts while in her orbit. This is a problem for not only bookkeeping but also psychoanalysis.
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Chekhov’s Pandemic?
Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.
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Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde
“The desire for that sort of purist kind of connection that one might call communion, is something that I’m interested in in all of my work.”
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Justin Torres Reads “Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop”
In this special episode of Writing Latinos, with the writer Justin Torres, we tried something new. Torres reads a short vignette on air—“Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop” by the Afro-Puerto Rican writer, Jesús Colón—and then we discuss it together. We had so much to talk about! Historical references. Readings of imagery. His message about…
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B-Sides: Percival Everett’s “Wounded”
“Wounded,” by shutting down fictions of escape, shows readers the struggle for safety is a shared one.
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
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Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
“What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are possible sources of liberation.”
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On Our Nightstands: March 2025
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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B-Sides: “Under the Sea-Wind” by Rachel Carson
Bill McKibben proclaimed nature’s demise in 1989. But Americans who cared about DDT’s poisonous effect and the extinctions that would follow had been warned almost three decades earlier. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) famously opens by imagining a world denuded of plant and animal life. In fact, it wasn’t only Americans Carson managed to terrify.…
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Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!
Immediacy, here, is an aesthetics of ambivalent aspiration, within a hierarchically ordered and immobilizing class- and race-based cultural system.
