Eight Self-Help Books That Actually Help
These titles are challenging where others are pandering, and open-minded where others are prescriptive.
Jacob and Esau
A poem for Sunday
Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans
In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America.
Why Travel Inspires So Many Writers
Journeys force us to consider where we’re headed and what we’ve left behind: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
As an environmental journalist and a parent, I worry that the animals in my son’s bedtime stories will disappear before he learns they’re real.
Eight Books to Comfort You When You’re Lonely
Reading may not be a salve for loneliness, but there’s nothing like the rush of being seen by literature.
A Black Birch in Winter
Published in The Atlantic in 1974
Remembering the Strange Dream of Lockdown New York
It took a pandemic to imagine a more humane city.
What’s Wrong With Following a Recipe?
On recipes, spontaneity, and time: Your weekly guide to the best in books
What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts
A 1933 novel tracks the Nazis’ rise to power in real time.
Girls’ School
A poem for Sunday
Six Classic Books That Live Up to Their Reputation
These novels are lengthy, but they lavishly reward the time and effort you pour into them.
What a Famous Writer’s Early Work Can Teach Us About Failure
Marguerite Duras’s second novel, The Easy Life, shows that all writing is practice.
What Successful Memoirs Accomplish
They make personal narrative into art: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The Shout
A poem for Wednesday
Why Read Literary Biography?
What Shirley Hazzard’s life can, and can’t, tell us about her fiction
The Atlantic 10
The books that made us think the most this year
The Reinvention of the Catholic Church
Scandals have taken a toll, and faith is flagging in Europe and the U.S. But Catholicism isn’t on the wane—it’s changing in influential ways.
Why It’s So Hard to Write About Science
Understanding something like a pandemic requires engagement with more than just biology: Your weekly guide to the best in books
‘That’s Just Like White Noise.’
Any writer with an interest in probing “American magic and dread”—to borrow a phrase from the novel—is probably in conversation with Don DeLillo, whether or not she knows it.