Nonfiction Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

Interviews

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

June 24, 2020 • by Charlotte Slivka and Ted Hamm

Charlotte Slivka [CS]: Bernie’s Brooklyn is so much more than what the title would suggest. This book shows a deep love for the city and how politics and life are so tightly intertwined in our dense and crazy city. Are you from New York? Ted Hamm [TH]: No, I grew up ...

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Interviews

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

April 28, 2020 • by Rachel Louise Snyder and LaVonne Elaine Roberts

LaVonne Roberts [LR]: You point out that most (54 percent) of mass shootings intersect with domestic violence. As a Texan, I grew up hearing about Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, after fatally stabbing his mother and his wife, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others. Is there any hope that convicted domestic ...

Uncategorized

Violence and Redemption in Northern Ireland’s Civil War

An Interview With Patrick Radden Keefe

March 16, 2020 • by Patrick Radden Keefe and Plamena Malinova

The following interview with Patrick Radden Keefe the 2020 award winner for nonfiction, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (PRH) traces the lives of Jean McConville, a widow with ten children ...