Book Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Interviews

Can Poetry Still Unite Us?

An interview with Sarah V. Schweig on her new poetry collection The Ocean in the Next Room

May 28, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr and Sarah V. Schweig

For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has always been a question of looking for the most truthful way to record things that had seemed otherwise inscrutable or difficult to understand. Her new collection, The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels back the noise of daily life to ...

Literature

Rabbit Heart

An excerpt from Gina Chung’s short story collection, Green Frog

May 13, 2025 • by Gina Chung

When I am eight years old, I am a girl who would rather hide than seek, a girl who fears bullies and teachers and loud noises and speaking in public and God. I am overweight for my age group, friendless, and known for thick glasses and dark overalls, which I ...

Feminism

Enemy Feminisms

Feminism is so capacious that it comprises its own mortal enemies

April 8, 2025 • by Sophie Lewis

Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine. Feminists across the political spectrum have taken pains to define their troops as chaste and untainted by lust (especially interracial lust); not to mention maternal, i.e., pure, straight, removed from the realm of productive work; and “natural,” that is, not artificial, not ...

Interviews

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

An interview about After David

January 23, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre and Catherine Texier

An older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it's looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome. In After David (ITNA Press, 2024), Catherine Texier explores these themes ...

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...

Literature

Helen Schulman’s New Novel Is a Nail-Biter

Lucky Dogs offers a home for strays

November 13, 2023 • by Paloma Velasco

I was a nail-biter in high school. I stopped when I went to college, embarrassed by what now seemed like a childish lack of control. Last week, Helen Schulman’s new anxiety-inducing novel, Lucky Dogs, made me relapse....

Helen Schulman’s New Novel Is a Nail-Biter

Activism

Andrew Leland in Conversation about The Country of the Blind

For some blind people, a white cane must be brandished with pride, never folded or disguised

October 23, 2023 • by Andrew Leland and Mitchell Abidor

In The Country of the Blind, Leland describes his experiences among the blind, including a course in which he artificially lives in the total blindness that will one day be his. ...

Andrew Leland in Conversation about The Country of the Blind

Art & Design

Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

An excerpt of Interior Frontiers

March 7, 2023 • by Ann Stoler

This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...

Past Present

Natalia Petrzela’s “Fit Nation”

Past Present Podcast, Episode 356

January 3, 2023 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss – and celebrate! – Natalia’s new book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession....

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...