reading Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

An interview with Katy Waldman

Ladane Nasseri [LN]: You wrote in a piece this year “the never-ending-ness of such a practice—of all critical practice, done right—is occasionally paralyzing.” As a literary critic, do you have a methodology to review a book in particular one that has been assigned? Katy Waldman [KW]: When a book is assigned ...