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Doug McLean What J.D. Salinger Understood About Chance Encounters
A.M. Homes on the short-story writer’s “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” and the lifelong effects of fleeting interactions
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AP The Glorious, Bizarre History of Soccer and Fashion
Simon Doonan’s new book, Soccer Style, summarizes the long and complicated relationship between athletes and outlandish style.
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Kevin Lamarque / Retuers / The Atlantic Bill Clinton’s Novel Isn't a Thriller—It's a Fantasy
The President Is Missing, co-written with James Patterson, indulges in a familiar trope: the country's top executive as action hero.
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Andres Stapff / Reuters A World Cup Without Eduardo Galeano, Soccer’s Poet Laureate
As the 2018 tournament kicks off, it’s worth revisiting the late Uruguayan writer’s classic book on a sport he approached as both a fan and a social critic.
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Studi8Neosiam / SvetMedvedeva / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin ... Florida, Full of Dread
Lauren Groff’s new collection of short stories is an ecosystem teeming with life, decay, beauty, and fear.
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Lisi Niesner / Reuters When Hamlet Starts Showing Up in Federal Court
A Pennsylvania judge’s decision to quote Shakespeare in a recent ruling doubled as a meaningful, yet still ambiguous, interpretation of cultural chaos.
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Chronicle Books Lorna Simpson Maps the Complex Galaxies of Black Women’s Hair
The artist’s new book of collages incorporates magazine clippings, watercolor, and geological formations.
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Mary Hudetz / AP / Arsh Raziuddin / ... What Tracy K. Smith Sees in America
In her latest collection, Wade in the Water, the U.S. poet laureate takes a loving and unflinching look at a country’s present and past.
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Tahreer Photography / Getty Does Honor Matter?
A new book argues it’s a virtue that can motivate people to struggle against injustice—but doesn't adequately consider the more pernicious ways it manifests in society.
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Doug McLean What Richard Pryor’s Stand-Up Can Teach Writers
The nonfiction author Cutter Wood on how the comedian’s work helped him imbue minor characters with emotional life
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Dylan Martinez / Reuters Was Classic Rock a Sound, or a Tribe?
Steven Hyden’s book Twilight of the Gods argues that the appeal of the now-dwindling Baby Boomer guitar gods was only ever personal.
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Joe Tabbacca / AP ‘The Trust of the Reader Is Distrusted by Roth’
How The Atlantic covered the late novelist Philip Roth from 1966 onward—via scathing reader letters, glowing reviews, and personal remembrances
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Pascal Parrot / Sygma / Sygma / Getty The Day the Genius Died
To mourn Philip Roth is also to mourn a particular kind of literary celebrity.
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Richard Drew / AP Remembering Philip Roth, a Giant of American Literature
The writer, who died at the age of 85, was the last of the larger-than-life novelists of the mid-20th century.
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Judy Snow Denison The Literary Insights of Sylvia Plath’s College Thesis
How the author’s undergraduate writings on doppelgängers shaped her most famous work, The Bell Jar, sometimes in troubling ways
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Jim Cooper / AP The Lexicon of Tom Wolfe
Remembering the writer’s contributions to the English language, which went far beyond the most obvious catchphrases that he popularized
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David A. Land / Ecco / Paul Spella ... Rumaan Alam Ponders the Limits of Parental Love
In his second novel, “That Kind of Mother,” the writer paints an intricate, uncomfortable portrait of transracial adoption.
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Leah Walker / Sarah Lee / Arsh Raziuddin ... The Art of Parenthood
New books by Sheila Heti and Michael Chabon explore the claims of family-making, and of writing.
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Showtime Patrick Melrose Is a Lacerating Tour de Force
The new Showtime adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s novels stars Benedict Cumberbatch as an Englishman ravaged by trauma.
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Steve Liss / The LIFE Images Collection / ... David Foster Wallace and the Dangerous Romance of Male Genius
A recent spate of #MeToo stories serves as yet another reminder of the centrifugal forces of talented men.
