Novel 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 ...

Literature

When Is It Time to Leave?

In her new novel, Overstaying, Ariane Koch plays with the comforts of home

January 30, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the ...

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. ...

Gender

Eau du Easy Mark

An excerpt from Lucky Dogs: A Novel

June 8, 2023 • by Helen Schulman

My natural scent could be called “eau du easy mark,” an odor only vermin can detect, a spicy mélange of paralysis perfume with prior-history-of-abuse essence....

Literature

Year of the Rat

An excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel

April 5, 2023 • by Marc Anthony Richardson

... it had a semi-prehensile tail that nearly snaked a forearm like an opossum’s or a cat’s, but it was a gargantuan rat’s ......

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Literature

Re-reading C. P. Snow

What the mid-century novelist and man of letters understood about being human in an uncertain world

July 30, 2020 • by Anthony Grafton

Rather like the legendary couple of whom someone, struggling to understand their mutual attraction, cracked, “Well, they are both carbon-based life forms,” these books seem pretty disparate. But all of them help me find calm at night, particularly now, when the shadows gather and the future looks even darker than ...

Past Present

Little Women

Past Present Podcast, Episode 213

January 28, 2020 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Greta Gerwig’s Little Women has received enthusiastic critical praise. Natalia referred to this New York Times article about the nearly all-white cast, and Niki recommended this New Yorker article about Laura Dern’s portrayal of Marmee. Natalia also cited this American Conservative article about the absence of faith in the latest adaptation. In our regular ...

Feature

A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition

June 10, 2019 • by David Stromberg

It's not that I'd never tried before. But something had to have happened, it seems, to make it possible to read the novel -- and that something appears to have been a period of depression. The reasons were complex -- to repeat someone else's phrase, a cocktail of circumstances -- and I’m not ...

Interviews

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

The New School creative writing professor talks about her latest novel, Come with Me

March 8, 2019 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham and Helen Schulman

At the center of the story is Amy -- partner of Dan, parent of the teenage Jack and twins Miles and Theo, and, most recently, employee of Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old geek-savant son. Donny has hired Amy as PR rep and guinea pig for his new project, Furrier.com, a ...

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

Feature

The Tale of the Missing Man

An excerpt from Manzoor Ahtesham’s milestone in Indo-Muslim literature, recently translated from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark

August 31, 2018 • by Manzoor Ahtesham, Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark

In the following, you can read an excerpt from the novel, in which Zamir Ahmad Khan realizes that studying at Aligarh Muslim University is not for him, followed by an interview with Manzoor Ahtesham, Jason Gronebaum and Ulrike Stark. A Mistake The year spent in Aligarh was like Chinese water torture, with ...

Uncategorized

English Psycho

June 23, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The third, and perhaps dominant mode was to stick to writing from the male point of view, but to make the male character a nebbish. As if to say: ‘see? How could we possibly be implicated in patriarchy? Men are so hopeless! Jerks, sure, but incapable of dominating their own ...