This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Until last fall, I had never heard of Helen Garner—something that’s hard for me to believe. The Australian author, now 81 and treasured down under, has barely been published in the United States. But over the past few months, the imprint Pantheon has been releasing new editions of her backlist, and these books are mind-blowingly good.
Join Atlantic editors Jane Yong Kim, Gal Beckerman, and Ellen Cushing in conversation with executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a discussion of “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious new editorial project from The Atlantic. The conversation will take place at The Strand in New York (828 Broadway) on Wednesday, April 3, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase here.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The idea of a settled canon, one that towers Mount Rushmore–like above us, is boring. I’ll admit that some books and authors, after enough centuries have passed and their influence seems without question, should have their names etched in stone (although even The Iliad and Shakespeare can occasionally stir up a fight).
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The temptation for a writer to turn their memoir into a self-help book must be strong. The author has looked back at her life, her choices, her blunders, her triumphs. And through this process of retrospection, she might see lessons learned that apply not just to her, but really, to everyone.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president, but then it comes with punishingly high expectations.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When you’re a parent who loves to read—or as the case is for me, happily, makes his living from reading—the first time you see your child become obsessed with an author is a genuine thrill. For both of my daughters, that author was Raina Telgemeier.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Nature writing has always been a little unsatisfying to me, I’ll admit. Unlike our relationships with other humans, which are tinged with friction and love and all the other ingredients of drama, our encounters with the natural world seemed fairly static. Nature exists out there: We walk through it, we enjoy its beauty, we sometimes feel its indiscriminate wrath.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The National Book Awards, a glitzy affair otherwise known as the Oscars for book nerds, took place on Wednesday night. One overwhelming motif pulsed through nearly all of the winning books: the will of marginalized people to have their suppressed stories heard and acknowledged.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The literary internet is full of lists that suggest books that will inform you about one subject or another—we just published one last week in this very newsletter (on what to read to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, we decided to go a bit deeper and asked Atlantic writers and editors for books that changed how they think.
George Orwell is forever the patron saint of language and the ways it can become degraded in times of war—when a split occurs between what is being inflicted on human beings, on human bodies, and the words of ideologues who want to keep us from seeing “what is in front of one’s nose,” as Orwell famously put it.
Updated at 3:12 p.m. ET on October 7, 2023 What a difference a week makes.Just eight days ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival, rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. A truce was holding in Yemen. Iranian attacks against U.S. forces had stopped. America’s presence in Iraq was “stable.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.At my small liberal-arts college, the freshmen were taught on the first day to chant in ancient Greek the opening line of The Iliad.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.For many who were purged during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, one erasure followed another. After being sent to the Gulag (if they weren’t shot in the basement of the Lubyanka building), the ousted person would suffer the further indignity of having their face crosshatched with frantic pen marks to make them disappear from family albums.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Sylvia Plath lived only to the age of 30—this year marks the 60th anniversary of her death. When you consider all that has been written about her, and the writers still thinking of her, the shortness of her existence is shocking.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The precipitous arrival of artificial intelligence into our lives over the past year has provoked some very deep existential quandaries, such as: What is it that a human can do that a robot never could? When it comes to creativity and whether art is within the range of a machine’s capabilities, this question is not so academic.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Enormous developments in neuroscience over the past two decades have allowed researchers to peer into the human mind as never before. But it’s not always comfortable to learn about the mechanistic workings of our emotions.
Updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on August 18, 2023.This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, is about a woman who spends her life trying not to see the harm her work is doing to the Earth. The main character, Bunny Glenn, has fallen almost unwittingly into a career in the oil industry.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.I’ve always been curious about what it feels like for an author to see their work translated into another medium. The question seems particularly interesting with a film like Oppenheimer, the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that opened in theaters this week. It tells the life story of J.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.On Twitter and talk radio and cable TV, Americans today can easily express and hear echoes of their basest thoughts without too much difficulty—racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, the whole cacophony of hate. But at one time, really knowing what your neighbors were thinking, or seeing who was hiding under the white hood, took some investigating.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Cormac McCarthy died this week. With him went a style that seemed chiseled out of granite—biblical, as if produced by an Old Testament prophet who had somehow found himself wearing dusty dungarees and shuffling through a desert in the American Southwest.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The great affection afforded the writer Charles Portis has largely to do with his voice on the page—not just the southern dialects that he captured so well, but a style of uniquely southern storytelling, dripping with pathos and humor.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.When the French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall, it was for her highly personal books—autobiographical narratives in which she places herself on an operating table and also acts as the surgeon, splaying out her thoughts and anxieties and desires in meticulous, vulnerable detail.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Good morning! I’m the senior Books editor at The Atlantic. I’m taking over today’s culture edition of the Daily for something a little different: an exciting update from our Books section, and some recommendations for your summer reading list.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Our summer reading guide is now live! This is our annual feature in which The Atlantic’s writers and editors get a chance to play that slightly pushy character at the backyard barbecue who practically screams out, “I just finished this book, and you need to read it! Right now.
The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn.
Imani Perry, a contributing writer to the Atlantic, has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for her book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Melding the language of poetry and historical research, Perry sought to understand the South, the region where she was born, and which contains, she believes, the key to understanding America.