This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The wives in Mavis Gallant’s stories aren’t happy. In “The Flowers of Spring,” from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel “despair and discontent.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If someone had no relationships—no colleagues to appease, no parents to make proud, no lovers to impress—how might they behave? With those interactions removed, would you be able to glimpse, as Jordan Kisner wrote in our May issue, an “authentic, independent self”? The author Katie Kitamura, whose new novel, Audition, is the subject of Kisner’s essay, isn’t sure.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Art-making is not the kind of work that is easily confined between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. An artist needs ample time to spend putting pen to paper, or brush to canvas; they also require unbounded hours or days to let their mind wander in search of inspiration. As Hillary Kelly has written for this magazine, “the dream state, the musing, the meditation” is what “makes space for ideas.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about old age. Earlier this year, most Americans seemed to share my fixation, as voters debated President Joe Biden’s mental fitness for a second term.
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.
Over the past week or so, my X feed has been overtaken by Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippopotamus whose glistening skin, jaunty trot, and rippling neck rolls have won the internet’s devotion.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
This week, we published two essays about new books featuring unusual, surprising female protagonists.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV dialogue and the sentences in books are frequently inelegant.
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A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature.
What about California captures the imagination of American writers? The state—the country’s most populous, and one of its most diverse—provides fodder for every sort of author.This week, Ross Perlin wrote about Malcolm Harris’s new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which argues that the titular city, as well as Silicon Valley at large, is responsible for “wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.
What can we learn from the reading habits of our political leaders? Like any preference, they provide a window into the priorities, obsessions, and inspirations of some of world history’s most consequential figures. Gabriel Boric, Chile’s progressive president, is a “serious reader of poetry,” Lily Meyer writes. One might wonder how his reading has influenced his robust education platform, which promises free university and student-debt forgiveness.
Why are so many writers drawn to campus novels? In a 2006 article, Megan Marshall writes that the genre is “escape reading.” Citing older works such as The Harrad Experiment and 3 in the Attic, Marshall sees many college novels as “fumbling and sophomoric confessionals.” That’s certainly changed. Campus novels today have expanded beyond the confines of the Ivy League and deal with some of our society’s most pressing questions.