Atlantic Reads: Screen People With Megan Garber
Staff writer Megan Garber and Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor, discuss Garber’s new book, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency.
Fiction
Books
See All
The Lost Idealism of Heartland Rock
The genre of Bob Seger and John Mellencamp reached across the ideological spectrum in a way that seems unimaginable today.
The Books That Take Revenge, Centuries Later
A new history of the Red Scare prompts the question: Does literature still have enough influence to bring down the powerful?
What To Read
See All
Eight of the Most Fascinating Biographies to Read
Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do.
Six Books That Simply Must Be Talked About
These six books demand discussion—with a pal, a date, or a book club.
Nine Books to Reset Your View of the World
Each of these titles will widen your perspective, offering you original insight and vision.
Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read
These titles are worth picking up, even if you have only a moment to spare.
The Buffalo Wallow
JACK TENNISON sold his first short story to the old Youth’s Companion. ”The check,”he writes, “was fifteen dollars, and this created some commotion in Company I, Volunteer Infantry, 1898.” Since then his stories have brought him an O. Henry Memorial Prize; and one of his novels, The Day of Souls, a story of pre-earthquake San Francisco, was called by Damon Runyon “the best, truest thing ever written about the city that was.”
The Tower
Artist, sportsman, and country gentleman, JAMES REYNOLDS is a painter of murals, an expert on Palladian architecture, and a connoisseur of Irish ghosts. His beautifully illustrated volume Ghosts in Irish Houses, which combines his two loves, has met with an enthusiastic reception in this country, as has his second volume, Gallery of Ghosts, which goes further abroad to find its themes in India. Restoration England, and in Maine. Mr. Reynolds’s first novel, The Grand Wide Way, was published last winter.
My Only Indian
Uncle Louis, the hero of ROBERT FONTUNE’S story, was also the hero of his play, The Happy Time, which ran in New York for seventy-seven weeks and which is now being “immortalized in celluloid.”Uncle Louis is a man who believes in the impossible and achieves it with a minimum of fuss. “As for me,”says Mr. Fontaine, “my colorless career includes everything from a window dresser’s assistant in Ottawa to a comptometer operator in the National City Bank of New York. A decade ago I discovered I could write and that writing was the ideal occupation for a man who liked to get up at noon and watch the bluejays go to bed. I have been at it ever since.”
The Hut
In the autumn of 1935 the Editor of the Atlantic dropped in at a literary agent’s office on his way to the Grand Central. “I want something to read on the train to Boston,” he said. “What have YOU got?" “Here is a short story from London.”said the agent, “by a new writer with a most improbable name, but they say he is good.”The story was “The Salvation of Pisco Gabor byGEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD,one of the best he ever wrote, and on the strength of it the Atlantic bought every new story that came from him in the next twelve months. They still come and they still are good. A novelist who served in Intelligence in the Middle East, Mr. Household is the author of The Third Hour, Hogue Male, Arabesque, and A Time to Kill.
The Changeling
JOSEPHINE JOHNSON, a native of Missouri, whose first published short story appeared in the Atlantic, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1934 with her beautifully descriptive novel. Now in November. Today she is living with her husband, her two children, and Fuzzy, the cat she describes in her story, in a 130-year-old house just outside of Cincinnati. In spite of her family responsibilities, she still finds the necessary quiet for the new novel on which she is at work.
Claudie's Cosmic Vibrations
A native Texan, DILLON ANDERSON established himself as one of the ablest young lawyers in Houston before he took time off for his fiction. This September has seen the publication of his first book, I and Claudie, a salty Texas narrative of two happy hobos who fortunately do not take themselves or their victims too seriously. Clint Hightower and his oxlike companion, Claudie, have adventured their way in and out of the oil country, Texas politics, hurricanes, revivals, and state fairs — and we hope there is no stopping them for some time to come.
The Fifth Day
A native New Yorker in his twenty-fifth year, PETER MATTHIESSEN was educated at Yale and the Sorbonne, and is now living and working in France. Last year he taught creative writing at Yale but gave up teaching in order to devote full time to his first novel. “Sadie” an Atlantic “First” appeared in the January issue. This is Mr. Matthiessen’s second short story.
A Girl Called Peter
Novelist and master of the short story, H. E. BATES was attached to the Royal Air Force during the Second World War; and the short stories which he wrote at that time under the signature of Flying Officer X had an enormous reading in England. His new collection, Colonel Julian and Other Stories, from which we have drawn the poignant narrative which follows, will appear as an Atlantic-Little, Brown book in early October.
We Play the Fool
MICHAEL HUNTER was born in Berlin but was taken by his family to England in his early teens when the Nazis came to power. He graduated from the University of California in 1942 and since then has divided his time between documentary film work and journalism. He did movie reviews and minor editing for the San Francisco News, was on the editorial staff of the New Yorker for a short time, and then, after working on documentary films for the Signal Corps and the March of Time, he returned to the West Coast to free-lance in fiction.
It's Later Than You Think
Of English parentage, MONICA STIRLING was educated in Paris, where her father directed the English Theatre and where she now lives and does her writing. In the early years of the war, she worked in the De Gaulle headquarters in London; after the Allied invasion, she returned to Prance and served for eighteen months as a special correspondent for the Atlantic. Meantime her short stories in the Atlantic had won her a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer award for a year s writing in Italy. In this interval, she wrote her first novel, Lovers Aren’t Company, which was published under the Allantic-Little, Brown imprint. We hope to have her second ready for press shortly.