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pop_jop / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The ... Housegirl Complicates the Diaspora Narrative
The debut from the Ghanaian British author Michael Donkor explores the life of a domestic worker in London, while rejecting the common impulse to focus on more aspirational immigrant stories.
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The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Casts an Unlikely Spell
Nicolai Houm’s third novel unspools the mystery of a writer who abandons fiction and winds up alone on the top of a mountain in Norway.
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Doug McLean The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
Gary Shteyngart dissects one of the “most unexpected” lines in fiction and shares how it influenced his latest novel, Lake Success.
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Scisetti Alfio / Shutterstock / The Atlantic Learning From Laura Ingalls Wilder
The author’s popular Little House books sought to challenge the way many Americans saw their country’s history, with deeply mixed results.
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Drawn & Quarterly Coyote Doggirl Gives the Western a Whimsical, Watercolor Spin
A new graphic novel from the artist Lisa Hanawalt (BoJack Horseman) gives an old genre the kind of heroine it’s never seen before.
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Greg Preston / Dark Horse Comics Remembering the Woman Who Changed Marvel Comics
Marie Severin, the trailblazing comic-book artist who drew some of pop culture’s most iconic characters, died Thursday at the age of 89.
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Moolkum / schankz / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin ... Suicide Club Takes On the Tyranny of Wellness
Rachel Heng’s debut novel turns the cultural imperatives of health into commands of a totalitarian state.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters The Complicated Female Genius of Lauryn Hill
Twenty years after the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the artist has been granted something rarely afforded to women: the space to make mistakes—and still be considered great.
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Kristian Buus / Getty Viv Albertine’s Got Something to Say
For her second memoir, the irreverent punk icon mixes a bit of vulnerability with a lot of grit.
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Doug McLean The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand
The author Laura van den Berg on what inspired her newest novel, The Third Hotel, and how she accesses the part of the mind that fiction comes from
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Zolotarevs / Shutterstock Poetry Is Everywhere
Far from “going extinct,” as it was once predicted, poems are viral, vital—and invincible.
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Calle Hesslefors / ullstein bild via Getty Images The Writer Who Makes Perfect Sense of Classical Music
Alfred Brendel’s essays about Beethoven, Schubert, and many others are deeply relevant to performers and amateur listeners alike.
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Drawn and Quarterly The Graphic Novel That Captures the Anxieties of Being Undocumented
Jérôme Ruillier’s The Strange understands how the immigrant experience for those without papers can be frightening, isolating, and rarely straightforward.
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Kwanza Henderson / Shutterstock How to Love a Jamaican Complicates the Idea of Home
Two Atlantic staffers discuss the writer Alexia Arthurs’s bright, complex debut collection of short stories and the larger tradition of immigrant literature from which it draws.
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Courtesy of DC Comics Batman, Catwoman, and the Marriage Plot in Comics
A year-long story arc saw the writer Tom King upending tradition by trying to pursue something novel for two iconic characters: personal growth.
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Doug McLean A Writer’s Fixation on Sound
The author R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing and how she stopped obsessing over the first 20 pages of her new novel, The Incendiaries.
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Jeremy Hudson / Getty Images Americans Have Some Pretty Vanilla Sexual Fantasies
A new book on the science of sexual desire finds Americans are surprisingly romantic and loyal to their partners when they fantasize about sex.
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Marvel Comics / Steve Ditko Steve Ditko’s Ordinary People
The legendary comic-book illustrator and writer, who died in June at the age of 90, infused characters like Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with a revolutionary sort of humanity.
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Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post / Getty Remembering Donald Hall, a Poet of Love and Loss
The writer, who died at 89, invested common words with the power of a constructive, shaping force.
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Jim Cole / AP What Donald Hall Understood About Death
In the pieces he wrote for The Atlantic, the late poet embraced the inevitability of aging and decline.
