Literature Archives - Public Seminar

Kinships

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

In forging an interview, Lerner’s narrator must reckon with what an actual recording would have let him avoid

July 20, 2026 • by Elena Rotzokou

Anyone who has transcribed a conversation knows the strangeness of the result: Speech, once written down, often looks less intelligent than it sounded. Repetitions that carried rhythm become clutter; vulnerable hesitations become defects; interruptions that were the life of the exchange become punctuation problems. To transcribe is not to preserve ...

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Interviews

Writing Rooted in Community

June 11, 2026 • by Colette Estelle and Giada Scodellaro

Writing rarely ever comes from true solitude. That is the sentiment of author Giada Scodellaro, whose debut novel, Ruins, Child (New Directions, 2026) is a hybrid text on proximity, grief, growth, and kinship told through the interweaving stories of a community living in a dilapidated apartment complex. In a recent ...

Multi-Verse

Elizabeth Metzger’s disembodied voice

Episode 17: “She’s both the midwife and the provoker”

May 27, 2026 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

“Oh it is worth being dust,” writes Elizabeth Metzger, in her poem “Into Her Future.” She’s talking about a particular kind of dust, the kind that takes pleasure in its own dispersal and oblivion: Elizabeth’s disembodied voice gleefully defies the physical boundaries of the living. Relieved of the obstruction of a ...

Politics

Marco Rubio in Dante’s Inferno

His orazion picciola at Munich, and the fate of Republican oratory post-Trump

May 18, 2026 • by Daniel DiMassa

It hasn’t escaped the commentariat that, among other things, the appeal of Trumpism is rhetorical. “I love the way he talks,” a supporter told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I understand him more than any other president.” Iterations of the same remark have become a refrain over the last decade. There ...

Literature

Did You Raise Something Monstrous?

In Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg turns a mother’s opioid-fueled narration into a study of gender, nationalism, and ideological inheritance

April 21, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn (One World, 2026), is narrated by Barbara Rosenberg, a dying Manhattan mother delivering a torrent of OxyContin-fueled recollections about her life and her estranged trans child, who now goes by “J.” The names are not subtle. Rosenberg’s second novel is a radical form ...

Artificial Intelligence

Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

Can I, um, use it at a friend’s house?

March 25, 2026 • by Elvia Wilk

Is it ok to use AI for spell check? What about grammar? Writing image captions? Smoothing transitions between paragraphs? Translating from other languages? Search Engine Optimization? Is my email autoresponder some kind of AI? If I accidentally click an ad for a Large Language Modal (LLM) targeted to me by ...

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, Discipline, and Finding Truth in Disaster

Artificial Intelligence

First as Comedy, Then as Farce

A conversation with Benjamin Mangrum on the assembly of The Comedy of Computation

December 16, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum and Rayna Salam

When confronted with change we don’t understand, there is only one thing to do: laugh. Or so says MIT literature professor Benjamin Mangrum. In his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025), Mangrum peers into the archives ...

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, When All the Men Wore Hats

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 ...