Episode 3: Novels & Intimacy
With the rise of webcams, smartphones, texting, and video-call software, human intimacy can now take many forms: not just between bodies together in a space,…
Category: Fiction
Storytelling Is Big Business | Public Books
A common refrain among people who work in media—and, by extension, among the academics who study them—is that when it comes to what will be…
Can Novels Make Amends? | Public Books
Some damage could not be undone and so atonement was a delusion. —Mary Gordon, Payback An era of reckoning, in so many different forms,…
Episode 2: Novels & Political Consciousness
How does reading novels affect our understanding of the power dynamics that shape our lives? Featuring: Elif Batuman & Merve Emre The novel may be…
Episode 1: Novels & Ideas
How do novels provoke readers to wrestle with complex, even dangerous ideas? Featuring: Teju Cole & Tara K. Menon In the 19th century, Mary Shelley’s…
A Labyrinth for Our Time
There is a House with 7,678 halls; in the House lives the eponymous protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi. The amnesiac narrator knows nothing…
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory | Public Books
The ethnic cleansing and ongoing colonization of Palestine are a war not only against bodies, ecosystems, and livelihoods but against memory itself. This war against…
Who Killed Nordic Noir? | Public Books
We begin, as usual, with a dead body. In April 2020 an 84-year-old Swedish woman died in the happily unsuspicious circumstances of old age. Her…
Books and Abandonment | Public Books
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, which was a sensation in Mexico on its 2017 publication, arrives in English during a season of stormy weather for anglophone…
Internet Dystopias after Trump | Public Books
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…