“I decided to use that experience of melancholy as a starting point that could add up to a novel.”

“Medicaid’s bureaucratic delays are commonly believed to be unique to public programs.” But private programs work on the same logic, writes Zachary W. Schulz. They just appear with different names: “prior authorization,” “network limitations,” “plan year resets.”

“I have this strange privilege of loving my work.” In the latest episode of our podcast Writing Latinos, Álvaro Enrigue shares his comfortable relationship with his writing. (Note to writers: love your work!)

“The great advocate of knowing ourselves in public is also the little-known champion of a surprising and moving defense of what we might think of as solitary solidarity.” New at PB:

“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”

New at PB: John Plotz considers Hannah Arendt’s take on oases, in a new installment of his series “Arendt in Dark Times.” Read the series here: www.publicbooks.org/tag/arendt-i...

“While states manage renewals and adjustments, patients wait in stasis—sometimes missing the very window in which care could have mattered most.”

New at PB: In a new episode of Novel Dialogue, poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt speaks with critic Matt Hooley (@citiless.bsky.social) about his debut novel, “A Minor Chorus,” and finding “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Hosted by Sarah Wasserman.

“I believe in change. Nevertheless, we are always also the same person.” New at PB: Álvaro Enrigue discusses publishing a book in translation, years after the original writing.

“How then do we cut a new path toward meaningful and effective acts of resistance? That question, Arendt realized seven decades ago, had to be answered not just in terms of what we do collectively, but also, crucially, what we accomplish alone.”

“What I am doing when I’m writing a book is asking for your collaboration.” In conversation with Geraldo Cadava, Álvaro Enrigue discusses NOW I SURRENDER, his latest novel to be translated into English.

New in his series Arendt in Dark Times, John Plotz unravels Arendt's take on the relationship between out outward lives of public action and our inward oases, or “the life-giving sources that let us live in the desert without becoming reconciled to it.”

For Medicaid to approve an HCBS waiver, one must prove home care isn’t more expensive than institutionalization. “This logic,” writes Zachary Schulz “is often explained away as fiscal discipline, but pragmatically it operates as a system of structured denial.”

“As Emiliano Zapata said, La tierra es de quien la trabaja. Books belong to those who read them, not to those who write them.” www.publicbooks.org/alvaro-enrig...

“This bureaucratic maze of waivers, state discretion, and federal oversight does more than delay care. It reshapes how people experience illness, aging, and vulnerability.” Zachary W. Schulz on Medicaid and waiting: www.publicbooks.org/the-waiting-...

New at PB: In the latest episode of our podcast Writing Latinos, @geraldo-cadava.bsky.social talks with author Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel to be translated into English, NOW I SURRENDER. Out now with @riverheadbooks.bsky.social. www.publicbooks.org/alvaro-enrig...

In an essay about a carriage collision, many writers would end with the crash. Thomas De Quincey, instead, sinks into a “Dream-Fugue,” restaging a passenger’s death, over and over. Revisit “The English Mail-Coach.”

“In American health care, waiting is not just a burden. It is a tactic.” New at PB: Zachary W. Schulz argues that long waiting lists for Medicaid HCBS waivers aren’t a “glitch in an otherwise functional system.” They are the system. www.publicbooks.org/the-waiting-...

New at PB: Zachary W. Schulz explores the relationship between waiting and healthcare in the United States. Your time only matters, Schulz writes, if it can be measured, billed, or saved. www.publicbooks.org/the-waiting-...

“An essay that begins as a reminiscence of spirited college days ends with an apocalyptic vision that places us on the very threshold of the infinite.”

“De Quincey invented drug literature. But his true purpose lay deeper: to contemplate the ‘hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings.’ His psychedelic maximalism will always find readers—still, it will never go mainstream.”

“People weren’t merely buying a novel; they were scavenging for a vocabulary that could map their own suffocation. In a society where the official tongue is engineered to mask the truth, Trías’s prose became our silent vernacular.”

“Is identity—any identity—the quintessential theme of salsa? What themes or recurring images define salsa’s generic and discursive practices?” New at PB: Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia reviews ““Made in NuYoRico.”

In our latest B-Side, revisit with Charlie Tyson “The English Mail-Coach” by Thomas De Quincey, “a late Romantic, an unhinged acolyte of Wordsworth and fellow addict Coleridge.”

“The roots of this literary haunting stretch back to when Trías’s La azotea (The Rooftop) and Mugre rosa (Pink Slime) first reached Iranian readers.” In a new essay, Miaad Banki on the meaning Iranian readers find in Fernanda Trías’s work.

“Negrón shows how the song’s portrayal of the singer’s private suffering & the mask of performative joy crystallized Lavoe’s tragic persona, becoming a lens through which to consider diaspora, fame, & loss.” New at PB: A review of “Made in NuYoRico.”

“Could I write a recognizably 'literary' novel—centered on one bourgeois woman, walking around New York—that managed to keep climate change central?” New at PB: Tara Menon in conversation with Nicholas Dames.

“Step by step, gallop by gallop, the essay’s nostalgia gives way to terror.” New at PB: Thomas De Quincey is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. But for Charlie Tyson, “The English Mail-Coach” reverberates across 2 centuries.

“Their friendship is already running out of time—and then time stops in a different way.” In UNDER WATER, Tara Menon writes about the devastation of a friendship cut short by natural disaster.

“It was as if the novel’s Caretaker—dragging the same wheelbarrow, holding the same anonymous bodies—had traveled from the fictional mountain to the streets of Tehran today.” New at PB: Miaad Banki on translating Fernanda Trías in Tehran.

“Negrón’s reading of the operatic song ‘Bandolera’ in Héctor Lavoe’s voice is both compelling and bold, as she dares to confront what many critics have avoided: the raw gender violence embedded in much salsa music.”

“‘The English Mail-Coach’ is one of the great meditations on mortality, on the speed with which life runs through our fingers, on how easily existence in all its radiance can be snuffed out.”

In a new review, author and scholar Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia asks: “When will we finally listen to a song for what it is, rather than for what it should have been?”

“While I struggled to find Persian words for Trías’s tales of quiet loss, the air outside was thick with the scent of gunpowder and the final breaths of a generation.”

New at PB: In our latest B-Side, Charlie Tyson revisits “The English Mail-Coach” by Thomas De Quincey. “The last great Romantic poet,” Tyson writes, “was a Victorian prose writer.”

“I suspected that actually it was possible to write a literary novel that was focused on a single individual psyche that could also index climate change.” New at PB: Tara Menon on writing a climate novel that focuses on one character.

“The true theme of salsa is salsa itself: sabor as condition, lo sabroso as experience (ex-periri), an inescapable work with the negative, a journey through danger and the ignition of misfortune.”

“In Tehran, the winter of 2026 did not arrive with the cold; it arrived with two nights of bullets and blood.” In January, translator Miaad Banki worked on translating Fernanda Trías’s No soñarás flores, while outside crackdowns on protestors killed thousands.

Debut novelist Tara Menon is a specialist in 19th-century British literature at Harvard. In conversation, @njdames.bsky.social asks her: “How does a novelist encounter, use, or refuse the theory that informs the academic study of fiction?”

New at PB: Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia reviews Marisol Negrón‘s “Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings.”

“Every Persian word I meticulously chose for Trías’s pages felt like a sacred ritual—my own clean rag. By finding the exact vocabulary for grief, I was trying to ‘wash’ the faces of those falling in the streets just blocks away.”

“In a society where the official tongue is engineered to mask the truth,” writes Banki, “Trías’s prose became our silent vernacular.”

Tara Menon reveals a source of inspiration for her debut novel UNDER WATER: “Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a poem that I first read when I was an undergraduate. I was overcome by its exquisite beauty and the way it evoked how grief for a friend can be all-consuming.”

New at PB: When the Internet went dark in Tehran in January 2026, Miaad Banki was at his desk, translating Fernanda Trías’s collection, No soñarás flores (You Will Not Dream of Flowers), into Persian.

“Disaster is not coming; it has happened and is happening.” New at PB: Tara Menon discusses her thrilling debut novel UNDER WATER with @njdames.bsky.social. Out today from @riverheadbooks.bsky.social.

Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue is back! Listen to the season 10 premiere:

New at PB: Co-EIC @njdames.bsky.social interviews Tara Menon about her debut novel UNDER WATER, a “deeply worldly first novel about the unsteadiness of human dispensations in an age of accelerating climate change.” Out today with @riverheadbooks.bsky.social!

“Zohar’s proposition comes across as yet another luxury experience, wrapped in an aestheticized interpretation of a cultural tradition rooted a few thousand miles from Midtown.” New at PB: @alexisclements.bsky.social reviews “Towards a Nude Architecture.”

Jazmine Ulloa was born & raised in El Paso. She returned as a reporter in 2019 following the killing of 23 people at a Walmart. “I saw this tragedy as part of a much, much larger legacy,” Ulloa tells Geraldo Cadava, “this sordid legacy of violence at the border.”

“Whether a person is a believer or isn't a believer, I would hope that we can agree that belief and religion and faith plays an enormous role in a lot of people. And has played an enormous role, an outsized role, in the American psyche.”