The Most American Form of Theater
A new play upends the contemporary notion that public debate needs to be a blood sport.
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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic What the U.S. Could Learn From an Irish Theater
For 100 years, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre has shown that a publicly funded troupe can deliver cultural riches and hard truths.
Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Elinor Darwin. Literature’s Enduring Obsession With Strange Sisters
In Xenobe Purvis’s novel, a brood of odd siblings illuminates the fears of their fellow villagers.
Photograph by Pia Guilmoth The Most Infamous Narcissist in Literary History Gets a Smartphone
A new stage production of The Picture of Dorian Gray conveys the cost of posturing online.
Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Marc Brenner. Two Murder Mysteries’ Surprising Window Into Human Genius
Why novelists love to imagine great historical figures as detectives
Illustration by Matt Chase The Sense That Most Defines a Culture
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue shows how colonization shapes a country’s culinary landscape.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ben Martin / Getty; Universal Images Group / Getty. When Wellness Can’t Bring Happiness
A provocative 1970s novel reads like a contemporary cry for freedom from the expectations of others.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty. A Vision of the City as a Live Organism
In this novel, Prague is impish, tyrannical—and alive.
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. 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.
Getty ; The Atlantic History Is Never Only One Person’s Story
A good group biography details with curiosity the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another.
Matt Chase
