The Atlantic’s literary editor picks the five best of the crop.
 Share
|
Email
Print
|
The Atlantic’s literary editor picks the five best of the crop.
The Hare With Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal
FSG
This rueful family memoir is also a vividly episodic history of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, and a plangent consideration of the pleasures and fleetingness of aesthetic and familial happiness. 
Letters to Monica
Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite
Faber and Faber
Even as this book chronicles an almost passionless and far from conventionally happy relationship, it yields moments of exquisite tenderness and acuity, while obliquely showing the civilizing effect that even the most trying woman can exert on even the most impossible man. 
The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan
Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind, with John Vinci and Ward Miller
Richard Nickel Committee
This publishing feat illuminates some of the most beautiful and influential art that America has produced. With painstaking clarity, it reveals the ways Adler and Sullivan balanced the severe, massive elegance of their façades with the rhythmic grace of their exuberant, often whimsical ornament. 
Saints and Sinners: Stories
Edna O’Brien
Back Bay
In prose as rich as loam, O’Brien discerns the various drives that coexist amid the welter of human behavior. The world she summons is a piercingly beautiful combination of yearning and disappointment, violence and endurance. 
Emily, Alone
Stewart O’Nan
Viking
With this quietly devastating, precisely observed novel that traces the course of three-quarters of a year near the end—but decidedly not at the end—of a widow’s long life, O’Nan, too long overlooked, has firmly established his place as one of our finest and most humane novelists.
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
News Corp. Braces for 500 Phone-Hacking Legal Claims
What's Tanking the Economy
Bloomberg: 'Just Before You Die, Remember You Got Three Extra Years'
Rethinking the Economics of Traffic Congestion
America's Economic Rebound
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]")
The Speed of Light 
Alter Ego 
Synthetic Biology 
Join the Discussion
After you comment, click Post. If you’re not already logged in you will be asked to log in or register. blog comments powered by Disqus