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
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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
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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.
Street of the Moon
The daughter of one of the leading Moslem families of Lucknow. ATTIA S. HOSAIN has been writing ever since her graduation from Lucknow University. Married and the mother of two children, she is living today in England, where she broadcasts regularly in the Eastern service of the BBC and where she is to have the pleasure of seeing her first collection of short stories in print this autumn.
Follow M' Leader
A master of Fnglish prose most recently celebrated for his fire-volume autobiography, which was described by the London Times “as an outstanding contribution to Literature,” SIR OSBERT SITWELL did not establish himself as a free lance until his resignation from the Guards in 1919. Then at Swan Walk, the house in Chelsea which he shared with his brother Sacheverell, he began to devote himself to his books and his collection of modern paintings - a performance which soon proclaimed his independence as a critic and his talent as a writer. A selection of his short stories is being reprinted this year, and to the group he has added this new and delightful satire.
A Woman Friend
MARY LAVIN does her writing today looking out on one of the loveliest curies of the River Boyne. with the famous Hill of Tara rising above the distant trees. A protégée of Lord Dunnsany. she turned to the Atlantic with her first short stories, which when published in 1942 in book form, under the title Tales from Bective Bridge, were awarded the James Tail Black Memorial Prize. Her first novel, The House in Clewe Street, was serialized in our columns, and her second, Mary O’Grady, was published in 1950.
Slippers That Waltz Till Dawn
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 condones his tivo 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 Ragland, and Maine. Mr. Reynolds’s second novel. Maeve the Huntress, was published this spring by Farrar, Straus & Young.
A Needle and a Thimble
Educated in the New York high schools and at Harvard, where he took his B. A. in American History and Literature in 1949 , GEORGE BLUESTONE is now studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. “And a good ileal of my time,” he writes. “has been spent in our basement apartment pounding the typewriter. The ‘work in progress is a novel based on experiences I had as a waiter in Catskill Mountain hotels for six summers
The Law-Abiding
A free-lance writer non living in New York City, MARC BRANDEL has four novels to his credit the last two being The Barriers Between and The Choice. He was born in England thirty-three years ago, educated in France. Switzerland, and at Cambridge University, but has become so Americanized in his fourteen years in this country that this is the first story he has ever written with a European background.
Seductio Ad Absurdum
CRARY MOORE is the pen name of a young Bostonian who writes us, “I grew up on a farm, surrounded by horses, beagles, and French verbs — no people though. Remedied that by coming out in New York. Three years at Vassar, time off for good behavior. Worked for a seaweed company in New York, ambled around Europe, and retreated, in good order, to Boston. I like it here.”
The Swiss Watch
Each year the Atlantic receives several thousand short stories in the form of fantasies, but it is a rare one indeed which kindles the imagination, much less the belief, of our readers; yet this is whatJOHN LEIMERThas done on three occasions. Our readers will remember his story “John Thomas’s Cube,”which has been reprinted a number of times since its original appearance in the Atlantic. A Chicagoan and a graduate of Northwestern, Mr. Leimert writes: “I make my living by selling corrugated paper shipping containers. My hobbies are watching cats for relaxation, writing fantasies for fun, and the Great Books, of which I am co-leader of a class at the Union League Club. I do not know whether the fantasies are a reaction to the Great Books, or the other way around.”
Buck Mudgett and the Eighteenth Century
An Irish poet, author ,and surgeon, OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY is almost as much at home in America as in Ireland. A gay, dynamic figure who pilots his own plane and loves archery, Dr. Gogarty was a fellow student with James Joyce and, so legend has it, the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. He first unlatched our affections with his nitty semi-autobiography, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, which appeared in 1937.
At Mrs. Farrelly's
Since his graduation front Loyola University in 1934,JOSEPH CARROLL has narked on newspapers, written publicity. done broadcast scripts for NBC, scried in the Army and, after the war, as a newscaster and then as an Associate Editor of Collier’s. After this apprenticeship, he took the plunge as a free lance and his short stories are being reprinted in anthologies, the surest test. “ I like ‘At Mrs. Farrelly’s” he says, “better than anv story Eve written up to now. Mrs. Farrelly’s conversation, considerably modified in the interest of propriety, is very like that of a lady in whose house f roomed when l first came to New York in 1939.”