Books Briefing
Our culture editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. A Nonfiction Writer’s Biggest Challenge
To explain how the world works, authors have to break down complicated systems—without being boring.
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Robert Rieger / Connected Archives A Book That Was Like Putting on ‘a New Set of Glasses’
I consider its argument almost every day.
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Michal Ronnen Safdie Stop Doomscrolling About Israel and Palestine—Read These Books Instead
The Atlantic’s books editor prescribes these titles as antidotes to the quick and dirty ways people are communicating on social media.
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Susan Walsh / AP This Week in Books: Louise Glück Wrote With Authority
The poet loved using myth, history, and legend in her verse.
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Frans Schellekens / Redferns / Getty This Week in Books: Madonna Is the Blueprint for a Diva
Mary Gabriel’s new biography reveals the star’s indelible position in pop.
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Fototeca Gilardi / Getty This Week in Books: My 10-Year-Old Adores The Iliad
A new translation of the epic poem plunges us into the world of the ancient Greeks.
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Artur Abramiv / Getty This Week in Books: History Scares Authoritarians
A new book looks at the “underground historians” of China who are resurfacing moments from the past that authorities would prefer be forgotten.
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Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: … This Week in Books: The Rare Novel With a Happy Parent
Loved and Missed shows what child-rearing is really like.
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Hulton Archive / Culture Club / Getty This Week in Books: Should We Still Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
A conversation with Clint Smith on the moral complexity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book
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Mondadori Portfolio / Archivio GBB / Everett Collection This Week in Books: Sylvia Plath Continues to Fascinate
Her life is still being unpacked 60 years after her death.
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The Atlantic / Mark Lennihan / AP; Maria … This Week in Books: Could AI Ever Write Like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood?
Two authors respond to the revelation that their work is being used to train artificial intelligence.
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Glasshouse Images / Getty This Week in Books: I Want to Know What Love Is
A new book argues that love has been “stolen away from the poets.”
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San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Getty This Week in Books: A Novel That Sees Through Self-Delusion
Lydia Kiesling’s new novel explores the line between culpability and innocence when it comes to climate change.
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Andrew Renneisen / The New York Times / … A Novel Doesn’t Have to Be About an Individual
James McBride’s radical approach to fiction
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Martin Parr / Magnum Reading in the Dog Days of Summer
Dive back into our summer reading list for some new suggestions.
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H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty There’s a Book for That
When you want a book that will show you how to do something new
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Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures The Book Behind Oppenheimer
A conversation with Kai Bird, a co-writer of the mammoth biography from which the new film is adapted
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Universal History Archive / Getty Going Undercover to Expose America’s Ugly Side
The forgotten postwar best sellers that sussed out prejudice
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Matt Black / Magnum The Lonely Narrator’s Journey
Osamu Dazai’s 75-year-old novel of alienation
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Pictures From History / Universal Images Group / … A Manual for Surviving History
For the Shanghai-born writer Eileen Chang, observation was a way of life.
