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Illustration by Adam Maida America’s Most Insidious Myth
It’s time to challenge our country’s dangerous obsession with self-reliance.
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Getty / The Atlantic A Novel That Probes the Line Between Justice and Revenge
The narrator in Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions for You has a healthy skepticism of true crime—but a decades-old murder pulls her in deep.
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Lucy Jones The Oscars’ Incredible Knack for Being Wrong
Despite a history of embarrassment, the Academy has somehow managed to hold on to its prestige.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Eduardo DiBaia/AP; Getty. A Novel in Which Nightmares Are All Too Real
The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez shows how violence can haunt and destabilize a civilization.
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Photo-illustration by Trevor Davis. Sources: Courtesy of Matthew … The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption
Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw their family as a kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb” and attempted to gather “two of every race.”
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Robbie Lawrence I Actually Went to the Lighthouse
Searching for Virginia Woolf on the Isle of Skye
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Illustration: Karlotta Freier You Should Be Reading Sebastian Barry
Ireland’s fiction laureate has a special understanding of the human heart.
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Johannes Hähle / Lifestyle Pictures / Alamy The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save
Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant.
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Getty ; The Atlantic The Case of the Unknowable Human
Dorothy Sayers’s most famous character is a detective who solves crimes with elegance—but he finds the deeper enigmas of human beings always out of reach.
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Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Vladimir Pomortzeff / … Did George Washington Burn New York?
Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.
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Benedict Evans / August The Miraculous Salman Rushdie
His enchanting new novel is a triumph.
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Nina Berman / Redux The Brutal Reality of Life in America’s Most Notorious Jail
I’ve been locked up in maximum-security prisons for two decades. My time on Rikers Island was worse.
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Getty; The Atlantic When Good Pain Turns Into Bad Pain
Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, recalls her life as a runner—and the culture she says the sport needs to change.
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Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship
Creative partnerships can be a challenge for fragile egos—but they also provide a lifeline in difficult times.
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Gregory Halpern / Magnum Remembering the Strange Dream of Lockdown New York
It took a pandemic to imagine a more humane city.
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Getty; The Atlantic What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts
A 1933 novel tracks the Nazis’ rise to power in real time.
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Getty; The Atlantic 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.
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Craig Sillitoe / Fairfax Media / Getty Why Read Literary Biography?
What Shirley Hazzard’s life can, and can’t, tell us about her fiction
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Photo-illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Source: Vatican Pool / … 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.
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María Jesús Contreras ‘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.
