The Books Briefing: What to Read This Summer
Works that evoke feelings of wonder about the universe, offer smart observations about life, and more: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Swimming in the Wild Will Change You
One man’s journey through public waterways—whether sparkling or dirty or algae-filled—challenges us to look differently at the commons.
Batter Bread
A poem for Sunday
The Books Briefing: The Wellness Dystopia
Works that unpack the dubious connection between consumption and health: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The Literary-Abuser Trope Is Everywhere
A spate of recent works—some memoiristic, some fictional—points to how uniquely teachers and mentors can manipulate their power.
‘A Wishing So Strong That There Are Moments She Nearly Believes It’
The writer Morgan Thomas on desire and risk
The Coal Cellar
A poem for “Inheritance”
Bump
A short story
Why Are We So Spiteful?
Our culture is pettily vindictive in part because it is unequal. But we cannot punish our way to a more just society.
The Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career
How she became a novelist, what politics and writing have in common, and why, at the end of every good story, someone’s got to die
The Books Briefing: Why the Graphic-Novel Format Can Be Perfect for Memoirists
Illustrated memoirs offer an expansiveness that prose ones sometimes cannot: Your weekly guide to the best in books
The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright
A previously unpublished novel invites a reassessment of a writer criticized for his doctrinaire pessimism about race in America.
How the Space Fantasy Became Banal
The final frontier, as a setting, has long channeled giddy dreams of human communion. A new group of cultural works explores the opposite possibility.
The Opportunists
In Louis Menand’s monumental new study of Cold War culture, success owes less to vision and purpose than to self-promotion.
Women Refusing to Be Like Other Women
New novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri explore the liberating power of isolation.
The Dharma of Working Out
In her new memoir, Alison Bechdel runs, climbs, bikes, skis, spins, and Soloflexes her way toward transcendence.
On Rape Narratives and the Surprising Value of Plot
Why literary novels about wrenching events are taking more and more cues from crime writing
The Books Briefing: How to Be Happy
Everyone says they want to be happy. But do we mean the same thing? Your weekly guide to the best in books.
Celebration
A poem by Grace Schulman, published in The Atlantic in 2009
The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout
A memoir of life in Silicon Valley, a capitalist satire, a novel that envisions a better future, and more: Your weekly guide to the best in books