Book Review
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Graywolf Girl, Haunted
A drowning haunts Susan Steinberg’s dark first novel about teenagers’ summer adventures.
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Illustration: Emily Haasch; Library of Congress The Students of Sex and Culture
Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston—spurred on by Franz Boas—revolutionized the way we think about humanity.
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Oliver Munday The Unbearable Smugness of Walking
Glorified for its creative benefits, the pastime has become yet another goal-driven pursuit.
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Reuters / Courtesy E. Jean Carroll You Should Really Read E. Jean Carroll’s Memoir
What Do We Need Men For? is overwhelming. It is exhausting. That is the point.
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Naomi Elliott What We’re Reading This Summer
Atlantic staffers pick 14 books to spend time with this season, including Freshwater, Republic of Spin, Killing and Dying, and more.
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Lucy Jones Tracing the Internal Queer Revolution
Riots and parades have made LGBTQ people visible. But a new anthology of writings from before, during, and after Stonewall shows the inward changes as more essential.
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Katie Martin ‘A Work of Art Designed by the Devil’
Dispatched by Life magazine to cover the Apollo 11 mission, Norman Mailer saw the lunar landing not as a triumph for mankind but as evidence of our hubris.
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Golden Cosmos The New Science of Building Baseball Superstars
“Sabermetrics” changed the national pastime. Now another technological revolution is transforming the game, for good or ill.
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Hokyoung Kim What Lies Beneath
Burrow far below the planet’s surface, and even there, humanity has left its imprint.
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Mariner Books Inside the Head of an Aging Serial Killer
A new story collection from Kim Young-ha complicates the trope of the relatable murderer and, in the process, puts the reader in a quandary.
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Lynne Sladky / AP Stories That Ask Whether Humans and Nature Were Always Incompatible
Karen Russell’s latest collection meditates on anxieties about mankind’s place in the world.
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Frances F. Denny / The New York Times ... A Novel That Weighs the Costs of Love and Motherhood
In Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn wrestles with the conflicting demands of family and autonomy for an undocumented woman in New York City.
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Owen Freeman Female Spies and Their Secrets
An old-boy operation was transformed by women during World War II, and at last the unsung upstarts are getting their due.
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Daan Brand / Bransch Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk.
How the “food revolution” turned us into snackers, guaranteeing the demise of healthy home cooking
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Henry Holt and Co. / art_of_sun / shutterstock ... Trust Exercise Is an Elaborate Trick of a Novel
Susan Choi’s taut, drama-school narrative asks: Where does art end and reality begin?
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Soho Press Science Fiction’s Preoccupation With Privacy
Two ambitious new novels build techno-futures in which surveillance offers disturbing new threats.
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Flip Schulke Archives / Mirrorpix / Arsh Raziuddin ... Art After Sexual Assault
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel explores fiction’s role in feminist consciousness-raising.
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Riverhead A Gilded Cage
A daughter explores the dark secrets of a family legacy.
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François Mori / AP The Indelible Awfulness of E. L. James’s The Mister
The author’s follow-up to her Fifty Shades series is hopelessly retrograde and dismally unentertaining.
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Manny Carabel / Getty / Matt Artz / ... How to Belong in America
The Pulitzer finalist Laila Lalami’s latest novel traces the story of one immigrant family and the seemingly inexplicable tragedy that ruptures it.
