This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The literature of ancient Greece and Rome seems to be in vogue. This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned Homer’s epic poems into best sellers, and yesterday the Nobel Prize was awarded to Anne Carson, a poet who has made a career of repurposing ancient-Greek works.
Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump.
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Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe.
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“How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that.
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Around the time I turned 15, I was convinced that the only person who really got me was a 17-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. Although Holden is fictional, the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye felt three-dimensional to me.
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Among my friends and family, I am notorious for being a skeptic. I don’t believe in ghosts; I find all cryptozoological sightings unconvincing; I dismiss astrology out of hand. But (and this might surprise my inner circle) I am quite open to the possibility that some form of extraterrestrial life exists.
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Last summer, I spent a shocking amount of time at my local D.C. pool reading about the Ebola virus. As my friends tanned on nearby chairs and tweens did cannonballs, I sat happily in the water, arms and e-reader barely staying dry, learning the details of an outbreak of a terrifying disease just two dozen miles from where I was wading.
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Growing up, the novelist and New Orleans native Nancy Lemann didn’t know how culturally distinct her home city was. “I just thought, Okay, this is what it’s like. This is what life is like,” she told my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who spoke with Lemann for an article about her first novel in decades, The Oyster Diaries.
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The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise. Several of my favorite titles are full of characters who utterly vex, agitate, and perturb me.
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When did literary fiction get so prudish? my colleague Lily Meyer asked in The Atlantic this week. Although raunchy romances are as popular as they’ve ever been, she writes, many realist novels are “evading sex” between men and women.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Recently, I went out for drinks with a young woman who wanted advice about establishing herself as a book critic. “Everyone has read less than you think they have,” I told her immediately. I reassured her that in some respects, making your way through the world’s great literature is a numbers game: Someone twice your age has simply spent more time on the planet—and has therefore had more time to turn pages.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the title character and Nel are friends and enemies all at once: Nel envies and eventually hates Sula but, at the end of the novel, finds herself entirely bereft without her. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Lila and Elena are united by their similarities in an unforgiving world, until their differences send them hurtling away from each other.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Anna Holmes has never forgotten reading Judy Blume’s Forever as a tween. Why? Because the book, published 50 years ago this month, happily acknowledged that a teenage girl might want to have sex, and that she might even enjoy it, as Holmes wrote last week.
“If you can’t laugh at yourself, you are so fucked”: During a conversation yesterday at The Atlantic Festival with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, Monica Lewinsky said this was one of the most important things she’s learned. In 1998, as a 24-year-old White House intern, she was entangled in a sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton and quickly became a subject of international scorn.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
A panic attack can feel like the end of the world. In his new novel, Pan, Michael Clune writes that during such an episode, “your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone.
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The most recent issue of The Atlantic taught me that the Scottish author Muriel Spark had, according to Judith Shulevitz, “a steely command of omniscience,” and frequently played with “selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices.” I knew that Spark was funny, and that her work was highly recommended by people whose taste I respect.
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For many people in their early 20s, graduating from college is both a significant milestone—perhaps the most important of their young life—and a rupture that leaves them utterly unmoored. (It has been this way for a long time; just ask Dustin Hoffman on that pool float.
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Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel’s career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest.
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When I went outside to read yesterday, the first thing I noticed was the sun on my face. I welcomed it, then wondered, Do I have sunscreen? Then I asked myself if I should have used the bathroom before heading to the park. I made it to a bench and opened my book just as a bold, chittering group of sparrows swooped down from a nearby perch; I watched them jostle one another.
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Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that’s not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They’re a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press.
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You have a plethora of metaphors to pick from when describing these early days of 2025. January is a phoenix rising from the ashes; a butterfly wriggling free of its chrysalis. If you like, picture a bouncing baby New Year in your arms, powder fresh. The images all amount to the same thing: January is a time to (metaphorically) turn the page.
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A 16-year-old girl may be wise, funny, well educated, and ambitious, and she can probably hold her own in conversation. She may have reached her adult height and shoe size. By this point in her life, she has probably read books or heard songs that will make a permanent mark on her. She may have had sex or fallen in love; she may be dead serious, and be determined to be taken seriously.
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James Baldwin—the playwright, activist, orator, and novelist—was born 100 years ago today. It is no fringe opinion that his work changed American letters forever. (Earlier this year, for example, The Atlantic named Giovanni’s Room one of the greatest American novels of the past century.) Today, Vann R.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Working on the Books desk of a 167-year-old publication offers incredible opportunities—and dredges up some insecurities.
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There were moments in Adam Higginbotham’s new book Challenger that made me gasp and flip to the endnotes. I wasn’t looking to find the story’s denouement—I already knew what happened on the morning of January 28, 1986: The space shuttle Challenger broke apart just over a minute into its voyage, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
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The fact that I live close to a dedicated cookbook-and-food-writing store—and that it’s one door down from a specialty market full of bread, cheeses, and confections—is a constant delight, though a mild threat to my household’s financial security.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Last year, I read something like 40 books, not counting all of the titles I picked up and abandoned out of disinterest, the ones I half-skimmed for work, or the advance copies I read 20 pages of. Depending on your point of view, that number may seem impressive or underwhelming.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.When the end of the year comes around, I know that I can count on taking multiple long, cross-country plane rides broken up by days’ worth of loafing on my parents’ or my in-laws’ couches. “Dead week,” as Helena Fitzgerald memorably calls the time from Christmas to New Year’s Day, is the perfect moment for aimless reading.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Last week, Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, died at the age of 80. Glück was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama; she won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and, three years before her death, the Nobel Prize in Literature (she was the first American poet to receive it since T. S. Eliot in 1948).
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The figure of the diva dominates modern pop stardom. She’s “the female version of a hustler,” says Beyoncé (who made a public appearance on Wednesday night with another contemporary super-diva, Taylor Swift; both have cemented their status with record-breaking tours this year).