Public Books

Public Books combines the academic world with the accessibility of the internet. Established in 2012 by Sharon Marcus, a professor of literature, and Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist, the digital magazine aims to share insightful writing that is knowledgeable yet easy to understand. Their goal is to add scholarly insight to conversations about current ideas, culture, and politics. Each weekday, they release one essay or interview, totaling five pieces each week.

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“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary

6 days ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Mugre rosa) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures.
“That’s How You Survive”: Gloria Blizzard on Third Culture Kids and Black “Identity”

1 week ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Third Culture Kids (TCKs) have the distinction of growing up between worlds—those of their parents and the country they have grown up in. While globalization is more popularly viewed as a catalyst for economic failure or success, it’s also partially responsible for imparting a sense of confusion for TCKs created by a sense of belonging neither here nor there.
Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin

2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Born into a refugee family of Afghan doctors in Berlin, Aria Aber is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Prize in 2019. Since the publication of the book, I’ve read it several times, admiring the courage and candor with which this poet confronts the detritus left behind by Afghanistan’s many wars.
Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | 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? In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago.
Nicolás Medina Mora on “América del Norte”

4 weeks 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.
Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper

1 month 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?
Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams?

1 month 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.
Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb

1 month 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.
Marie Arana on “LatinoLand”

1 month 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.
Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde

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.