This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
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).
The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Her most well-known novel, Americanah, explores race, love, and migration through the story of a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S.; in 2013, she gave a TEDx talk titled “We Should All Be Feminists,” which Beyoncé sampled on her song “Flawless,” bringing Adichie to instant international attention.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The lonely, alienated young male narrator is a common figure in literature across time and place. Readers encounter him in the unnamed, frenzied protagonist who stalks around Christiania in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; in Leopold Bloom as he wanders James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses; and in J. D.
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Audiobooks have never worked for me; as a rule, I don’t listen to them. I recognize this as my own failing, but while one is playing, I’m easily distracted. All it takes is one glance up at a poster on the street, or down at my phone, and I’m tuning out what I’m hearing.
The wolf’s yellow eyes, sharp claws, and snapping teeth haunt our fairy tales and idioms, Erica Berry writes in her recent book, Wolfish. She asks why the animal has persisted as such a potent symbol of fear, arguing that this may color the way we see the world we share with animals and one another.
Imagine this familiar scenario: A book club has decided to meet at an appointed time and place. A host has lit candles, set wine and cheese on a table, arranged chairs in a circle, and put on background music. The guests arrive, maybe holding hardcovers with stiff spines or library-laminated dust jackets. The room fills with chatter as attendees grab their glasses and sit. Then there’s some silence, some twiddling of thumbs, some sipping.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as Clarissa Dalloway runs errands throughout London, the narration takes note of the sensory feast that she encounters: “the swing, tramp, and trudge” of urban life; “the bellow and the uproar” of music, yelling, cars, buses, and an airplane overhead. Clarissa famously revels in “life; London; this moment of June.