Sharon Marcus

Feb 6, 2025 | publicbooks.org | Sharon Marcus |Ryan Boyd |Imani Radney

Sharon Marcus, author of The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019), talks with author, poet, and scholar Deborah Paredez about American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous (Norton 2024), hailed by Time as one of the 100 must-read books of the year. Sharon Marcus (SM): We are here to talk about your recent book, American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous, which discusses Rita Moreno, Tina Turner, Venus and Serena Williams, and many others.

Feb 5, 2025 | publicbooks.org | Jeffrey Careyva |Sharon Marcus |Charlotte Rosen

When people say that video games are dumb, they actually have a good point. Yes, video games are full of masculinist power fantasies and predatory monetization schemes, but this doesn’t mean that video games are a complete waste of time. Rather, being literally dumb—that is, without speech—is essential to how many of the most iconic video games operate.

Oct 18, 2023 | publicbooks.org | Sharon Marcus |Charlotte Rosen

Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a political novel with a difference. Most political novels deploy characters as symbols. To denounce totalitarianism, Animal Farm depicts dictators as pigs. To promote individualism, The Fountainhead idealizes a heroic loner. To imagine how society might reconcile capitalism with Christian charity, North and South weds a self-made industrialist to a philanthropic minister’s daughter. Birnam Wood, by contrast, replaces allegory with moral realism.