The Arch of Injustice | Public Books
Asked to identify the city that best captures the long arc and ongoing dynamics of American history, most people would select New York or Philadelphia…
Tag: Books
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…
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos | Public Books
French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani likes to reveal the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity: her messed-up characters and their psychosexual dramas are fascinating in the same…
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…
Beyond the Objectivity Myth | Public Books
On March 11 of this year, I closed the door to my study, not sure when or if I would return. It is one of…
The Limits of Telecommuting | Public Books
Forty years prior to COVID-19, Alvin Toffler saw the future of working from home, and it looked very good. In his 1980 best seller, The…
Buster Keaton Falls Up | Public Books
Comedy inverts norms and breaks barriers. But in order to reveal, as Northrop Frye suggested it must, “absurd or irrational [patriarchal] law,” comedy requires a…
Let’s Polarize Together | Public Books
We may have only one world, but life unfolds in many layers. A good way to understand our multitiered reality is through three seemingly unconnected…