Is Cohabitation the Feminist Future?
Stories about women living together are proliferating—and offering alternative visions to the nuclear family.
Books
Introducing The Atlantic’s expanded books coverage: essays, criticism, fiction, poetry, and recommendations from our writers and editors
Peter Hujar’s Photos Are All the Rage. He’d Be Shocked.
A new biography brings the late photographer’s relationship with the artist Paul Thek to vivid life.
If You Want a Better World, Act Like You Live in It
We’ve had Henry David Thoreau the environmentalist, the libertarian, the life coach. To understand his influence, think of him first as a dissident.
The Publishing Mystery That No One Wants to Talk About
A minimally speaking autistic man just wrote a best-selling book. Or did he?
The Paradox of Modern Medicine
Testing has become so advanced that doctors now miss important elements of diagnosis.
What To Read
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Eight of the Most Fascinating Biographies to Read
Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do.
Six Books That Simply Must Be Talked About
These six books demand discussion—with a pal, a date, or a book club.
Nine Books to Reset Your View of the World
Each of these titles will widen your perspective, offering you original insight and vision.
Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read
These titles are worth picking up, even if you have only a moment to spare.
Newsletter
The Books Briefing
Our culture editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Subject to The Atlantic's Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions
Fiction
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Scars
A short story
Fortunes
A short story
The Honor of the Layward Brothers
A short story
We Are Not One
A short story
What Alice Munro Has Left Us
A reflection on the death at 92 of the Nobel Prize–winning master of the short story
The Wild Blood Dynasty
What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit
25 Books to Get Lost in This Summer
The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods.
A Family Story About Colonialism and Its Aftereffects
Claire Messud tells a complicated and ambivalent tale about her French family’s history in Algeria.
Tapering
A poem for Sunday
The ‘Lurid Metaphors’ of Illness
Meghan O’Rourke recommends her favorite books about sickness and health.
The Female-Midlife-Crisis Novel
Miranda July’s new book is full of estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.
Listen to What They’re Chanting
A close look at the words being shouted at protests on campuses across the country reveals why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.
She Was No ‘Mammy’
Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, American Gothic, was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
Some Late-Breaking Adjustments to My New Autobiography
Which is entirely true, by the way.