Public Books

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.