Reviews Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

In I Do Know Some Things, the poet proposes an “encyclopedia of self”

February 13, 2026 • by Rayna Salam

“Who you are and who you think you are: They grind against each other, sand in the frosting,” poet and painter Richard Siken writes in his long-awaited third collection. I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) continues his previous exploration of selfhood, but with a harrowing purpose. In ...

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

Literature

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

Cloud Variations presents performers, chamber orchestra, and poetry in a prismatic exploration of language, translation, and mother tongue

December 18, 2025 • by Grace Dignazio

Poet and performer J. Mae Barizo’s monodrama Cloud Variations is a transdisciplinary foray interweaving poetry, chamber orchestra, visual art, and theater. The piece places Barizo’s “Cloud Pantoum,” a poem previously published in The Atlantic, in conversation with Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3 to create a kaleidoscopic meditation on body, technology, ...

A Transdisciplinary Foray Into Classical Performance

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

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Literature

Blurb Me

Promotion uber alles in Ada Calhoun’s Crush

June 3, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A ...

Film & Performing Arts

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

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. ...

Social Research

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its last issue

July 20, 2022 • by Social Research

The current issue of Social Research is based not on a special theme but rather on the conviction that words matter, books and ideas matter—and some books, special ones, deeply affect our lives and how we think and what we think about. To bring home this perhaps trivial truism—that books ...