Benjamin Schwarz picks the five best of the crop.
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Benjamin Schwarz picks the five best of the crop.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg
Picador
This collection of 20 years’ worth of stories—their milieus vividly defined, their dialogue unsettlingly real, their characters hyperobservant—establishes Eisenberg’s place at the pinnacle of American fiction.
A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers
Will Friedwald
Pantheon
Friedwald chronicles the Great American Songbook, its creators, and its interpreters—a body of work that stands at the apogee of this nation’s civilization. Quirky, opinionated, shaped by exquisite taste and judgment, this feat of musical and cultural criticism offers an exuberant glimpse into the American character.
Private Life: A Novel
Jane Smiley
Knopf
A heartbreaking, bitter, and gorgeous epoch-spanning novel of a woman’s life stunted by marriage, this is Smiley’s best book yet. Making dazzling and meticulous use of her historical scope, she has written a work at once majestic and gemlike.
The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind
Melvin Konner
Harvard
This monumental book—more than 900 pages long, 30 years in the making, grand and intricate, breathtakingly inclusive and painstakingly particular—probes the biological evolution of human behavior and specifically the behavior of children. It is the flower of an astoundingly productive and innovative period of scholarship.
What Becomes: Stories
A. L. Kennedy
Knopf
Kennedy’s approach in these lapidary stories is off-kilter and desolate—most of them involve unions unhappy or unraveling, and violence animates several. The author, a supremely refined stylist, leaves the reader shaken, but not in despair. Humor, albeit of a particularly hard-won variety, suggests Kennedy (a sometime stand-up comic), is necessary for fortitude.
See the 15 runners-up here
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
Journalism's Gender Imbalance Includes Who's Quoted, Too
Obama Makes Nice with Poland
How 'The Wire' Found Its Omar: 'The Omars of the World are Warriors'
Why You Should Say 'Hello' to Strangers on the Street
Rethinking the Economics of Traffic Congestion
How to Handle a City of Tourists
![The Fraught Mobile Politics of the United States of Amercia [Sic]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/nancy_scola/amercia.thumb.screenshot.jpg "The Fraught Mobile Politics of the United States of Amercia [Sic]")
New York City Ballet: A Crystal Palace 
The Speed of Light 
Synthetic Biology 
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