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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | Helen Schulman
Sometimes I wonder, “Why did we have to wait this long?”
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Feb 20, 2025 | 
publicseminar.org | Madeleine Adams |Joseph Matthews |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
A bigger burro? | Jürgen Scheeff / Unsplash LicenseIt’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
publicseminar.org | Hannah McIntyre |Catherine Texier |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
Diana and Cupid (1761) | Pompeo Batoni / Metropolitan Museum of Art Public Domain CollectionAn older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it’s looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
airmail.news | Helen Schulman
Playworld by Adam Ross Playworld, author Adam Ross’s long-awaited second novel (his first, Mr. Peanut, was published in 2010), starts off with a narrative bang: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents’ named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Michael Inman |Mary Karmelek |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
Postcard of Polly’s Restaurant, Greenwich Village (ca. 1917) | Jessie Tarbox Beals / Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Miss Mathilde Mourraille, 1938This past October, the New York Public Library launched Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923, an exhibition documenting one of the most impactful countercultures in American history.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Mitchell Abidor |Edwin Frank |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
“Teenage Boy Reading” | Roy Zalesky / Smithsonian Museum / CC0In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of the NYRB Classics publishing house, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and around the world.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Mitchell Abidor |Ronnie Grinberg |Brianna Corley |Helen Schulman
“Ye Town Crier” (1908) | Robert Seaver / CC0 1.0 UniversalEarlier this year, the historian Ronnie Grinberg made a bit of a splash with her first book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton, 2024).
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin |Anna Reumert |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
Rapid Support Forces militiaman outside the Presidential Palace in Khartoum, Sudan (2023) | Sudan War Monitor, permission of publisherSince his books were banned in Sudan in 2011, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin has been forced to critique war, state violence, and injustice in his country from a distance. Exile has only sharpened his dissent.
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May 31, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Helen Schulman
The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg To start, I am a reader with a penchant for precocious young protagonists: Esch, the pregnant, 14-year-old storyteller in Jesmyn Ward’s voluptuous Salvage the Bones; Simons Everson Manigault, from Padgett Powell’s first novel, Edisto, whose eccentric mother more than encouraged her pre-teen son’s literary genius; Salinger’s near-mythic Holden Caulfield; and my own favorite voice (probably) of all time, the also pregnant Dewey Dell Bundren’s in William...
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May 21, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Ahmed Abdullah |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman |Laura Briggs
Cover image of A Strange Celestial Road by Ahmed Abdullah (2023) | Blank Forms EditionsPrior to the April 1975 concert with Sun Ra, I had worked at the East several times with different groups. Besides working with the Master Brotherhood, I had performed in 1970 with baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett in his New York debut as a band leader. The concert with Sun Ra and the Arkestra was going to be something of special significance to me. One could feel the electricity in the room.
