Anne Carson, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today, doesn’t write masterpieces or door-stoppers, and she has no interest in emulating the great works of the past—including those of past laureates. Despite her training as a classicist and her celebrated skill as a translator, she would likely have little to say about the authenticity of film adaptations of The Odyssey.
László Krasznahorkai, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature today, is not the easiest writer to read. His sentences can go on for hundreds of pages; his plots don’t resolve, they dissolve; and his persistent mood is existential dread. But the Hungarian novelist’s central theme is easily parsed and sadly evergreen. Krasznahorkai writes about the stultifying effects of political oppression, but he also writes in defiance of people’s readiness to accept them.
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Mindfulness is hardly a new idea—when have we not wanted to live more vividly in the present?—but the search for a balanced life has never required so many devices. The word itself has become something of a catchall recently, calling forth an entire industry of platforms, wearable tech, and wellness gurus.
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Honor Jones’s debut novel, Sleep, starts with a child’s perception of the world around her. I’ve known Honor, a senior editor at The Atlantic, since we were both children, and reading the book was a little like immersing myself in our own long friendship.
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In her new short story, “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” the author Lauren Groff captures the precise moment when a friendship changes forever. “Wannsee” follows two friends from high school who reunite one afternoon after many years apart; the encounter alters their understanding of each other in ways that neither anticipated.
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“Frankie met Lucia in that summer …” If there’s a better beginning for that greatest of all genres—the summer romance—I don’t know what it would be. Add in an ice-cream shack, a beach, a thunderstorm, and some distracted parents—all of the irresistible ingredients are here in Ruby Opalka’s “Spit,” a short story published in The Atlantic this week.
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The 24-year-old Diné poet Kinsale Drake’s “Making a Monument Valley,” which appears in The Atlantic’s September issue, maps the Indigenous history of Los Angeles with pulsing, kinetic language.
As editors who review poetry for The Atlantic, we read a lot of poems. Each week, there are new PDFs in our inboxes; our desks are covered with chaotic piles of books we’ve yet to crack open, and our shelves are already packed with old favorites. We’re also frequently asked, “What poetry should I read?” The question couldn’t be more reasonable, but embarrassingly, it tends to make our minds go blank.
Waking, you’re delighted: “Oh!” A
long, loud cry. But the dog’s not there.
You were dreaming. I woke looking
at the hands you said were beautiful.
All this dead-end summer, the hours
at the end of the day debriding hope,
the hours in the morning asking fear
to stay beside us. These are the years
beyond perfection, the days the coneflowers
rock from side to side like particles
suspended in the drying early Front Range air.
One of the most striking qualities about the poetry of Louise Glück, who on Thursday won the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the way it returns again and again to the start of things—a story, a myth, a day, a marriage, a childhood. The question How do we begin anew? runs throughout the American poet’s work, from Firstborn (1968) to her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).