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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Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on “Puerto Rico: A National History”

1 week ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

In the new episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo about his most recent book, Puerto Rico: A National History—out next month in paperback from Princeton University Press. Meléndez-Badillo offers a sweeping history of the island since Spanish colonization. Most provocatively, he chronicles a long tradition of thinking about Puerto Rico as an independent nation, even though it has been a territorial possession for the better part of five hundred years.
Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde

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?
“Lying in Politics”: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt … [and they] hope that the lie will be convincing. … These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts. … The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie.
When Universities Are Agents of the State

2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

“What is a university and who is it for?”This was the question to which this essay was supposed to respond. It’s a question I turn over and over again in my mind, walking myself in circles. Federal agents have detained, kidnapped, and disappeared multiple graduate students for their participation in peaceful protest against Israeli genocide. Anti-Zionist speech is an act of domestic terror.
“The Brutalist”: Rebuilding, Repatriation, and the False Antidote of Aliyah

3 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, architect László Toth is shown building a desk accompanied by a nondiegetic recording of the first time David Ben-Gurion read aloud, in Hebrew, the Israeli Declaration of Independence. On the surface, what we see doesn’t relate to what we hear; we have just seen László arrive in America, and while we have heard the character speak in English, Hungarian, and Yiddish, it is unclear whether he understands Hebrew.
Justin Torres Reads “Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop”

3 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

In this special episode of Writing Latinos, with the writer Justin Torres, we tried something new. Torres reads a short vignette on air—“Youth: The Palisades as a Backdrop” by the Afro-Puerto Rican writer, Jesús Colón—and then we discuss it together. We had so much to talk about! Historical references. Readings of imagery. His message about gender, class, and race. “Youth” in the context of Colón’s other writings. The vignette as a powerfully evocative genre that Torres uses in his own writing.
B-Sides: Percival Everett’s “Wounded”

3 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

It has been almost 27 years since the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old college student in Laramie, Wyoming, who was kidnapped, pistol whipped, robbed, set on fire, and then left to die tied to a roadside fence. I remember thinking how lucky I felt, back in 1998, to be living far away from that rural road in Wyoming. Even then, though, I must have recognized the folly of believing the worst would always happen elsewhere, out there beyond the law.
“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary

4 weeks 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 month 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

1 month 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.