Laurie Sheck, Author at Public Seminar

Habitats

Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space

We have turned the sky into a mirror of our persistence and our forgetting

February 4, 2026 • by Laurie Sheck

1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful ...

The Monster Became My Companion

A conversation on Cyborg Fever, the cold stream of data, and why entropy wins out

June 11, 2025 • by Matthew Kosinski and Laurie Sheck

Any book worth reading will refuse to be paraphrased. So it goes with Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025). Even the truncated plot summary, rich as it is—a young orphan falls into a coma when his beloved nun suddenly stops speaking to him, and in the ...

Language Matters

How do we teach classic literature if we cannot discuss offensive words?

September 2, 2019 • by Laurie Sheck

Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning. As I put the syllabus together, I sought out texts that would challenge our most basic assumptions (for instance, that a novel has a plot; an author’s work must ...