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1 week ago | 
publicbooks.org | Geraldo L. Cadava |Megan Cummins
Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in an MFA program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s working on a failed history of Mexico—meaning his own failure to write his book, and the Mexican nation’s failures, especially in relation to the United States.
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1 week ago | 
publicbooks.org | Rebecca Ballard |Megan Cummins
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos?
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2 weeks ago | 
publicbooks.org | Andrew Newman |Megan Cummins
In 2004, an 11th-grader named Judd Cramer at Mountain Lakes High School in New Jersey was assigned to read the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. “I did not engage with it as much as I wish I had,” he explained to me a few years ago by email. “I only studied what was necessary for the test—themes, etc.” But several years later, in 2011, he read it again. This time, Cramer wasn’t a student; he was working as a labor economist for the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers.
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2 weeks ago | 
flipboard.com | Megan Cummins
3 days agoOxygen is running low in inland waters—and human activities are to blameRivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs aren't just scenic parts of our landscape—they're also vital engines for life on Earth.
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2 weeks ago | 
publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins
The Light at the End of the World is Siddhartha Deb’s third novel. The novel moves spatially from the center (New Delhi) to the “light” emerging from an edge of the Indian republic—the Andaman Islands. A heterotemporal novel, The Light at the End of the World goes back from near future Delhi to 1984, 1947, and 1859: all key moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian history.
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3 weeks ago | 
publicbooks.org | Geraldo L. Cadava |Megan Cummins
Marie Arana has had a fascinating career as an editor and writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights; amemoir called American Chica; a history of Latin America titled Silver, Sword, and Stone; and a stunning biography of Simón Bolívar, the so-called Liberator of Latin America. Arana was the editor of the Washington Post’s Book World and the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress.
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4 weeks ago | 
alkami.com | Megan Cummins
Leading up to Alkami Co:lab 2025 and our third annual Women in Banking event, we connected with some female leaders to ask them about their experiences in the financial services industry, their perspectives, emerging trends, and where they think the future of digital banking is heading. In this blog, we’ll hear from Megan Cummins, Strategic Consultant at Engage fi. The banking industry as we know it is changing.
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1 month ago | 
publicbooks.org | Chris Holmes |Emily Hyde |Megan Cummins
We kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and coproducers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives.
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1 month ago | 
publicbooks.org | Amna Akbar |Megan Cummins
The week after the election I talked on Zoom with Silky Shah, a friend and an incredible immigrant justice organizer. I have learned so much from Silky over the course of our long friendship, and it was an honor to talk with her about her new book. As I write in the foreword, Unbuild Walls is much more than a theoretical guidebook. It is a tool and sophisticated primer for activists, organizers, students, and intellectuals who hope to change the world.
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1 month ago | 
publicbooks.org | Geraldo L. Cadava |Megan Cummins
You probably remember the picture of himself, both thumbs up, that Donald Trump posted on social media with the caption, “Best Taco Bowl.” It was his ode to Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo 2016. The picture mocked relentlessly, and deservedly so. For Latinos, taco bowls aren’t really a thing. And even if they were, it’s doubtful that Trump Tower would serve the best of them. For Latinos, Cinco de Mayo is less of a thing than it is for other groups.
