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Kim Ryu Amy Hempel Is the Master of the Minimalist Short Story
Amy Hempel’s best short stories reveal how rich spareness can be.
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Julien Pacaud Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.
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Simon & Schuster Brain Surgery, Up Close
Watching a neurosurgeon at work is awe- and cringe-inducing.
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Pablo Cozzaglio / AFP / Getty How Climate Change Has Influenced Travel Writing
A new book from Barry Lopez underscores how the genre has evolved as planetary conditions have worsened.
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Catapult The Strange Beach Novel That Would Make Mallarmé Proud
Chloe Aridjis’s Sea Monsters doesn’t care much for plot, instead seductively gathering energy through images, repetition, and metaphor.
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Viking What Medical School Doesn’t Teach About Death
A palliative-care doctor learns the language of suffering and the limits of medical control.
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Denise Nestor John Roberts’s Biggest Test Is Yet to Come
The chief justice writes fiercely conservative opinions, yet champions the Court’s political independence. How will he respond to a constitutional crisis?
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Christian Northeast The Bitter Origins of the Fight Over Big Government
What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us
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Najeebah Al-Ghadban Hollywood’s Secret History of Sexuality
David Thomson’s fascinating, and frustrating, tour of gay subversion and female oppression in American movies
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Jeffrey McWhorter / AP Closing the Gulf Between Black and White Christians
In a new book, a black evangelical challenges his white counterparts to take full responsibility for their complicity in racism, and to commit to changing America.
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Antoine Maillard A Bold New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves
A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males.
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Jack Mitchell / Getty Wes Anderson Is Under Edward Gorey’s Spell
He was a writer-artist ahead of his time, but Tim Burton, Lemony Snicket, and American culture have finally caught up.
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English Heritage / Heritage Images / Getty Ghost Wall Explores the Human Cost of Nativist Nostalgia
Sarah Moss’s new novel about Iron Age reenactors could have been a plain Brexit parable. Instead, it’s a deeper exploration of societal cruelty.
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Thibault Camus / AP French Eroticism Withers in Adèle
With Leïla Slimani’s new novel, a literary genre gets its most joyless installment yet.
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Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Katie Martin / ... Kamala Harris’s Political Memoir Is an Uneasy Fit for the Digital Era
The senator’s new book shows the difficulty of translating short-form virality into a substantive text.
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adoc-photos / Corbis / Getty Debussy’s Radical Search for Simplicity
A biography published 100 years after the composer’s death reveals the worldly trials of an artist known for his airy fantasies.
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Princeton University Press Fairy Tales for Young Socialists
A collection of political fables from late-19th- and early-20th-century Great Britain offers striking allegories that remain pertinent today.
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Katie Martin / The Atlantic The 19 Best Books of 2018
Highlights from a year of reading, including Ada Limón’s The Carrying, Tommy Orange’s There There, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and more
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Bijou Karman The Irony of Modern Feminism’s Obsession With Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A new biography squares the decorous legal figure with the feminist gladiator.
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Hanna Barczyk Sam Lipsyte’s Lame Send-up of a Guru and His Acolytes
In Hark, the characters are distracted, and their author veers between satire and sincerity.
