“How revealing, then, that a New York Times staffer recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality, because of its supposed progressivism … Given this lament, we must ask: Is the cissexual literary world okay?”

New at PB: Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia.bsky.social) reviews Davey Davis‘s “Casanova 20” (@catapultbooks.bsky.social) and Grace Byron’s “Herculine,” two novels that—however different—both “quietly exalt real friends above other conceptualizations of love.”

“I don’t understand why so many people have conceded that the university is a left space. Can someone show me a Marxist university president?”

“People need to educate themselves about the history of biology and public health more broadly.”

“I also developed a class anger. It was the language I used to make sense of what was happening.” New at PB: Edna Bonhomme moved to NYC 2008, right after the financial crash. Her work with the city’s most vulnerable shaped her approach to public health.

Rana M. Jaleel’s keyword contribution to “University Keywords” is “Title IX.” “The Trump administration has minimized the question of discrimination as an issue of access; instead, it used the statute in the service of a paternalistic protectionism.”

“To over-exist is to wait for the war to end, to face the fact that its time is not permanent. But to over-exist is also to firmly remain within the war.”

“They should be afraid of us; they should be scared of a silent majority of people who do the labor, and that labor is tied to who’s working at the hospitals, such as janitors, nurses, physicians, interns, teaching assistants, and so forth.”

At Public Books, we offer a portrait of the university to come: without walls and without borders, online and free for all. If you want to support the work we do, we hope you'll consider a tax-deductible donation. buff.ly/JF5zxCh

New at PB: @daryatsymbalyuk.bsky.social applies Azra Hromadžić’s idea of “war swimmers” to her mother and other bathers in the waters of war-ravaged Ukraine.

For our roundtable on “University Keywords,” Dan Nemser offers “revenue” and highlights four flows: 1) state appropriations; 2) tuition and housing; 3) research funding (whether public or private); and 4) distributions from endowments and gifts.

“How do we form a collective unit, whether it’s mutual aid or labor unions? How do we make sure organizing is popular again so people can actually have strikes and so forth?” New at PB: Edna Bonhomme on bringing activism to public health.

On June 6, 2023, the Kakhovka Dam, which has been occupied by Russian forces since 2022, was breached. Swimming was discouraged, but over time, bathers returned to the water—including Darya Tsymbalyuk’s mother.

This week, we launched a brand-new website design, and a redoubled commitment to the goal we’ve had since the very start: creating a classroom the size of the world. Support Public Books as we work to make the life of the mind a public good. buff.ly/JF5zxCh

“I do hope that we can get there, to the point that people truly feel free.” New at PB: Edna Bonhomme (@jacobinoire.bsky.social) talks with Harris Solomon (@harrissolomon.bsky.social) about Bonhomme’s new book, “A History of the World in Six Plagues.”

Next up in our roundtable on “University Keywords”: “Ed tech,” from @anniemcc.bsky.social. “The [pandemic] was being used as an opportunity to make fairly significant investments in ed tech “tools” without, in most cases, any real buy-in from the faculty.”

“The progressive and leftist organizers that I knew before think about three things: educate, organize, and agitate. And that could apply to the public health students and public health people.”

What are the keywords of the university? Vineeta Singh answers: “Discipline. I wrote about how scholarly disciplines arrange labor time in space; and, in so doing, disciplines impose a scarcity model on knowledge production.”

“Downstream from Kakhovka to the Dnipro-Buh Estuary, and to the Black Sea, the water carried roofs, land mines, pillows, fertilizers, and bodies. A terrified roe deer was documented all the way down to Odesa, brought there on a small reed island.”

New at PB: Harris Solomon (@harrissolomon.bsky.social) interviews Edna Bonhomme (@jacobinoire.bsky.social) about her new book, “A History of the World in Six Plagues,” which explores the real lives and the embodied aftermaths of disease.

Public Books has a new look! We're also free to read and we’re committed to remain so. If you want to support our writers, our editors, and the Public Books collective as we enter a new chapter, we hope you'll consider making a tax-deductible donation. buff.ly/JF5zxCh

“There has been little relief from the Trump administration’s assault on higher education, producing new forms of capitulation from universities and the entities that govern them.”

While the struggle to defend the university will be fought over many years, the fight to reinvent the university—and to build the ideas necessary for escaping our public crisis—starts now. Support Public Books: buff.ly/JF5zxCh

New at PB: In a new roundtable commissioned by @dennismhogan.bsky.social, @andyhines.bsky.social discusses the new edited collection “University Keywords” with Rana M. Jaleel, Vineeta Singh, @anniemcc.bsky.social, and Dan Nemser.

While the struggle to defend the university will be fought over many years, the fight to reinvent the university—and to build the ideas necessary for escaping our public crisis—starts now. Support Public Books: buff.ly/JF5zxCh

“What does it mean to narrate a war, particularly from a place where the war has been lasting for years?” New at PB: @daryatsymbalyuk.bsky.social finds a way to articulate survival in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

We've got more than just a new website redesign this week: Here we offer a portrait of the university to come: without walls and without borders, online and free for all. Support Public Books: buff.ly/JF5zxCh

“Even in that moment of the catastrophe, for Liudmyla, it is ‘we’ that will over-be. And that ‘we’ included us, on this other anonymous end of the screen.”

There's a new look at Public Books! We’re debuting a brand-new website (we can’t stop looking in the mirror), and a redoubled commitment to the goal we’ve had since the very start: creating a classroom the size of the world.

New at PB: @daryatsymbalyuk.bsky.social builds on a brief quote from a survivor of the Kakhovka Dam disaster, using the idea of “over-existence” to articulate Ukranians‘ attempts to imagine an unimaginable after Russia‘s occupation.

“Researchers have a question they don’t ask often enough: What does your positioning let you see?” New at PB: Hazem Almassry on displacement as method.

“They made a new English out of their formatting and spelling mistakes, alongside new Americas of their own.” New at PB: A review of “Discomania” by Jennifer Gibbons and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict” by June-Alison Gibbons.

“Guthrie’s lyrics and Hernandez’s prose illuminate today’s complicity in trauma-producing violence of deportation by air.” New at PB: Eric Porter on the deportation flight, and a 1948 crash whose coverage in the media dehumanized 28 Mexican nationals.

New at PB: Hazem Almassry looks at displacement as method. Displacement as method, he argues, means asking different questions. Not “How do states produce violence?” but “What makes state violence acceptable to institutions claiming to prevent it?”

The Gibbons sisters “dropped out of school at 17, they lived on the dole and took correspondence writing courses, and spoke to nobody but each other in a private language.” Jaye Chen looks at the passion, fantasy, and juvenilia of their novels.

“ICE contracts its charter flights through air brokers, which in turn hire subcontractors to do the actual flying. Classic Air Charter was the air broker from 2017 to 2023, at which point the contract was taken over by CSI Aviation.”

Researchers value neutrality. But “you can’t pretend the system doesn’t touch you when your mother's death in an Israeli airstrike appears in UN casualty reports you’re analyzing,” writes Hazem Almassry.

“The unspoken fluidity and minimal reference to race in these authors’ late fiction imply that bondage of Asianness seems to be the final cage that authors are excited to rid themselves of.” New at PB: Jaye Chen on deracialized fiction.

“Displacement positions you simultaneously inside and outside systems. Close enough to understand how they operate on people you know. Far enough to have the institutional access that lets you research them. That’s an analytical position.”

“Three days after the crash, the 28 Mexican victims were buried in separate coffins in a mass grave in a Fresno cemetery. Their families were not notified about the burial.”

Academic researchers study collapse, failure, institutions under pressure—but many of them from a place of distance, often thought to equal neutrality. Only the displaced researcher, argues Hazem Almassry, sees neutrality is constructed.

“If one flies, one is, to some degree, implicated as a willing participant in a security apparatus that includes deportation flights.”

“Israel’s unremitting use of violence, whether against Gazans engaged in armed resistance or unarmed protests, explains why the Oslo process was abandoned by many Palestinians, including Eid.” New at PB: Two new books show the reality of Gaza.

“Fanfiction is in every way a healthier literary community for young writers than the Real Literary Context I now write in as an adult. There was always someone who cared, and there was an infinite appetite for risk.”

“I left Gaza in 2014. My family stayed. I’ve lived in Algeria, now Taiwan. My wife’s father was erased from the Palestinian civil register in 1967—not killed, administratively removed from official existence by Israel.”

“By turns heartrending, joyful, ruminative, and infuriating, these two books bring into focus a Gaza rarely seen and even less commonly rendered, save in a stray photo by an inspired photographer, or a poem dashed off by one of its many wordsmiths.”

New at PB: Hazem Almassry puts pressure on a common division in academic research that states that proximity equals bias and distance equals neutrality. But what about the displaced researchers studying the systems that are operating on the people they know?

“Activism focused on deportation flights is indeed a necessary, specific response to a violent, dehumanizing political technology.” In a new essay for PB, Eric Porter looks at the big business of deportation by air.

In a new review for Public Books, Jaye Chen looks at the forthcoming posthumous publication of “Discomania” by Jennifer Gibbons, along with “The Pepsi-Cola Addict” by her twin sister, June-Alison. Both are works of “experiential fiction.”

“An AP newspaper account identified the crew members—two pilots, a flight attendant, and an immigration officer—but referred to their incarcerated passengers only as ‘deportees.’” Eric Porter on a 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican nationals.