Literature Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

The Garden of Wrath

An excerpt from The Oyster Diaries

March 31, 2026 • by Nancy Lemann

Maybe all families are alike on annual beach vacations. Tense. We used to go on an annual vacation with the in-laws to the Southern coast in August. Our destination was an island off the coast of South Carolina. I-95 was horrendous driving down from Washington on a Friday after work, the ...

Interviews

Writing With One Eye Squinting at Doom

A conversation with Nancy Lemann on releasing her first novel in twenty years—and why she never stopped writing

March 31, 2026 • by Nancy Lemann and Coleson Smith

Nancy Lemann’s forthcoming novel, The Oyster Diaries (New York Review Books, 2026) is her first publication in over twenty years—and not for lack of trying. Despite the enduring appeal of her first two books—both set in New Orleans—The Lives of the Saints (1985) and The Ritz of the Bayou (1985), ...

Interviews

Larissa Pham on Her New Novel, Discipline, and Finding Truth in Disaster

On the elasticity of art, the detritus of memory, and making the reader sweat

February 17, 2026 • by Jacqueline LeKachman and Larissa Pham

Larissa Pham’s new novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), started out as something else entirely. “I was going to write ten really gnomic, mysterious meditations on American paintings,” she told me, as we chatted on a snowy day in January. “I have this whole fantasy of writing these weird meditations. And ...

Larissa Pham on Her New Novel, <em>Discipline</em>, and Finding Truth in Disaster

Literature

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

In I Do Know Some Things, the poet proposes an “encyclopedia of self”

February 13, 2026 • by Rayna Salam

“Who you are and who you think you are: They grind against each other, sand in the frosting,” poet and painter Richard Siken writes in his long-awaited third collection. I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) continues his previous exploration of selfhood, but with a harrowing purpose. In ...

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

Literature

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

Cloud Variations presents performers, chamber orchestra, and poetry in a prismatic exploration of language, translation, and mother tongue

December 18, 2025 • by Grace Dignazio

Poet and performer J. Mae Barizo’s monodrama Cloud Variations is a transdisciplinary foray interweaving poetry, chamber orchestra, visual art, and theater. The piece places Barizo’s “Cloud Pantoum,” a poem previously published in The Atlantic, in conversation with Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3 to create a kaleidoscopic meditation on body, technology, ...

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

Literature

Against Storytelling

Stories are certainly utilized as a strategy to touch people’s hearts—but mostly when there is something to sell

December 9, 2025 • by Miriam Rasch

The glorification of storytelling to define who we are or save the planet induces aversion in some: Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the obsession “story-selling.” Do digitally packaged stories restrict how we perceive our often rambling, fragmentary lives? Could alternatives be found in open, porous and incomplete narratives, even when confronting ...

Interviews

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, When All the Men Wore Hats

When the writing writes itself

November 20, 2025 • by Elizabeth Mirabelle and Susan Cheever

I met Susan Cheever at the Carl Schurz Park dog run, on the Upper East Side, to discuss her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025). It’s her usual morning haunt: a place where she gives her beloved Corgi a bit of free-roaming exercise, ...

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, <em>When All the Men Wore Hats</em>

Genocide

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

A review of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

November 14, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume ...

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

Literature

Naguib Mahfouz’s Last Dreams of Cairo

In a new translation of the author’s late writing, dreaming is an act of mapping Egyptian identity

November 11, 2025 • by Mariam Matar

The Arabic word barzakh refers to the liminal space between death and the day of judgment. In his introduction to a new collection of Naguib Mahfouz’s late-career writing on dreams, editor and translator Hisham Matar describes Mahfouz ensconced in a barzakh-like state during the final decade of his life. In ...

Literature

Shakespeare Among the French Romantics

One way to take the temperature of a society in crisis

October 30, 2025 • by Sophia Charles

In 1776, Voltaire penned a letter to the Académie Française. His subject was Shakespeare, his mood grim. He was responding to a new translation into French of the playwright’s work, still little known to France. In the context of the French Enlightenment, Shakespeare came as a shock. Instead of dramatizing nobility of ...

Democracy

Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

October 27, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...