Books Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Children of 2008

A guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement

March 12, 2026 • by Dave Kamper

Solidarity, we’ve always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked ...

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

Sisyphus, From Memory

An excerpt from Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 14, 2025 • by Wendy Xu

He was a god, or he wasn’t. He was a king, at least. He had some relation to both the gods on high, their glamour and power, and the lowly world of mortals. Of course you must imagine him with the stone, and it was a stone I’m sure, and ...

Podcast

Fagin!

March 19, 2025 • by Claire Potter

It's about antisemitism. That’s right—a topic that was apparently unspeakable in the United States, even two years after American and Soviet soldiers liberated the first Nazi death camps. But antisemitism was unspeakable—although not as much so as homosexuality. Crossfire, another 1947 movie, was originally about a homophobic murder and rewritten as ...

Literature

A Termination

An excerpt from A Termination by Honor Moore: a memoir about choice, loss, and identity

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore

He bends to look in.It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.Are you sure?Yes. ...

Art & Design

Where the Avant-Garde Went to Grow

Behind the scenes of Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923

November 26, 2024 • by Michael Inman and Mary Karmelek

We have really rich, deep collections of materials related to Greenwich Village, especially dealing with this period of the Village's history. When the wider public thinks of Bohemias or avant-garde settings, especially from that time period, the early twentieth century, their thoughts might gravitate towards Paris in the 1920s, or ...

Capitalism

Who Gets to Retire?

An excerpt from Work, Retire, Repeat

October 17, 2024 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

For the first time in modern American history, gains in retirement time are concentrated at the economic top. ...

East Asia & Pacific

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, The Storm We Made

A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing shines a light on a rarely discussed period of Malaysian history

June 5, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In the lonely period of the pandemic, Vanessa Chan could not get home to her family. In those years, she lost her mother. She sheltered in place. And she wrote her first book, The Storm We Made....

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, <em>The Storm We Made</em>

Gender

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

June 3, 2024 • by Gregory Laski

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...

Body & Mind

Forget This Book

In The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez elegizes what we don’t remember

March 11, 2024 • by Chloe Cheimets

Whether we remember them or not, the details of life still drive our lingering emotions. ...

Literature

The Little Prince Haunts New York

Following Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from the Ritz to the East River

March 5, 2024 • by Albert Nguyen

When I moved to New York, I set out to discover how my new adopted home had influenced that sense of tristesse in The Little Prince, which Saint-Exupéry wrote during his 1941–1943 stay in the city....