Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks the 25 best in a crowded field
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Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks the 25 best in a crowded field
The Top Five
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A Life
By Michael Burlingame
Johns Hopkins
Measured, psychologically astute, authoritative when it can be, Michael Burlingame’s exhaustive narrative (2,024 pages!) is unafraid of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This is the life of Lincoln for our times.
[Read Christopher Hitchens's full review from the July/August Atlantic]
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK: A Novel
By A. S. Byatt
Knopf
Byatt has wrought a richly detailed, decade-spanning, at once Olympian and pointillist masterpiece. To read this gorgeous bolt of fiction is to fully enter a world.
[Read the full review from the October Atlantic]
THE THIRD REICH TRILOGY (Concluding With The Third Reich at War)
By Richard J. Evans
Penguin
Evans’s cool, crisply argued three-volume chronicle will be for a generation the definitive general history of Nazi Germany in English.
IT’S BEGINNING TO HURT: Stories
By James Lasdun
FSG
This collection of short stories illuminates the everyday agonies of the mind, its anxieties, obsessions, doubts, and yearnings. Lasdun pins each observation to the page with grace and exactitude.
[Read the full review from the September Atlantic]
MRS. WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
By Alison Light
Bloomsbury
In her elegant, sparkling book, Light marries social and literary criticism as she probes the deeply intimate, often sordid, always fraught relationship between women servants and their female employers.
The Runners Up
TOO MUCH HAPPINESS: Stories
By Alice Munro
Knopf
[Read the full review from the November Atlantic]
Dominion from Sea to Sea
Bruce Cumings
Yale
The Art Instinct
Denis Dutton
BLOOMSBURY
The Hundred Years War, vol 3
Jonathan Sumption
University of Pennsylvania
The Hindus
Wendt Doniger
Penguin Press
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic
Gordon Wood
Oxford
The New Old World
Perry Anderson
VERSO
The Thirty Years War
Peter H. Wilson
Harvard
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Carmen M. Reinhart and Keneth Rogoff
Princeton
Florence Nightingale
Mark Bostidge
FSG
Flannery: A Life
Brad Gooch
Little Brown
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
Peter Martin
Harvard
In the Kitchen
Monica Ali
Scribner
Reading Dance
ed. Robert Gottlieb
Pantheon
Words in the Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton
FSG
Charles Dickens
Michael Slater
Yale
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt
The Arabs
Eugene Rogan
Basic
Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman
Arnold Weinstein
Princeton
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life
Frances Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire
Brendan Simms
Basic
Collected Stories
Lydia Davis
FSG
Doin' It in the Park: No Gatorade (Excerpt)
The Visual Clichés of Instagram
Synthetic Biology
David H. Freedman on smartphone apps and the perfected self, Mark Bowden on being in the dumb kids' class, James Parker on Glenn Beck, Isaac Chotiner on P. G. Wodehouse, and more
Browse back issues of The Atlantic that have appeared on the Web. From September 1995 to the present, the archive is essentially complete, with the exception of a few articles, the online rights to which are held exclusively by the authors.
See All Back Issues: September 1995
Marvin Kalb Proud to Defend Arnaud De Borchgrave
What the Web Knows About the Canadian Foot-Mailing Suspect
The 11 Days Zuckerberg Spent as One of the 40 Richest Humans
What Critics Get Wrong About Creative Cities
Great Moments in the History of Boondoggles
The Pseudo-Suburbanist's Dilemma
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