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.
The Behavior of Mr. Frumkin
The daily visitors to a publisher s office include those who are curious, friendly, and hopeful, but the routine is occasionally interrupted, as HONOR TRACY reminds us in this story, by the arrival of a mysterious stranger whose designs and whose manuscript are not easily disposed of. Everyone who has ever worked in the editorial sanctum will testify that her story, which comes to us from London, has the true ring of experience.
A Psychiatrist of One's Own
An American novelist who is note living and writing in Rome, MARTHA GELLHORN wrote her first novel in Paris at the age of twenty-three. As a correspondent she covered the Civil War in Spain; Munich; Czechoslovakia; Finland; and the war in China before Pearl Harbor. During World War II, she reported from England, Italy, France, Holland,and Germany. The story which follows will form part of a new book to be published this year.
Jody Rolled the Bones
RICHARD YATES went straight from his prep school into the Army, where he served as a rifleman in the closing phase of the war in Europe. There followed what he calls an unimpressive series of newspaper and publicity jobs in New York: — brightened by the evening courses in Creative Writing which he took at Columbia. In 1951 he plunged into free-lancing and since then has been living and writing abroad.
Adventure
Last year, before he left his sanctuary in Dublin for an extended tour of the United States, FRANK O’CONNOR was asked how he wrote his short stories. Said Mr. O’Connor,“With me it’s a difficulty of temperament. Mine is lyrical, explosive. I write a story with a feeling of slight regret for poor Shakespeare’s lack of talent and wake up with a hangover that makes poteen look like cold water. Then, having cursed life and forsworn literature,I start rewriting. If I can work up the Shakespeare mood often enough I may get it right in six revisions. If I don’t I may have to rewrite it fifty times. This isn’t exaggeration.”
Good-Bye, Little Sister
CRARY MOORE is the pen name of a young Bllostonian 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.”I he Atlantic published Miss Moore’s first story in May.
The Sprained Ankle
Mother of three children and grandmother of two, BELLE F. WINESTINE began writing fifty years ago. After her graduation from the Unirersity of Wiscansin, she was a reporter on a daily Montana newspaper and then manager and editor of a weekly newspaper. I hare two un produced plays, she writes us, “an unpublished book, half a dozen unpublished children s books (written for my grandchildren), and scores of unpublished stories.”But here is one story the Atlantic is proud to publish.
Second Life
FRANCES JUDGE, whose husband is Chief Ranger in Grand Teton National Park, wrote from Moose. Wyoming, enclosing what she called ”a profile of life in the Jackson Hole valley with my great-grandmother, who homesteaded here when she was over eighty years old. . . . I have never sold either an article or a story to a leading magazine,”she added, “but I’d give my eyeteeth to say what I have to say so interestingly and so well that I’d find myself contributing to the Atlantic every whipstitch.”
The Orchard Ladder
GEORGE GREEN, who has been occupied at various times as a truck driver, bartender, and farm hand, returned to Holy Cross after two and a half years in the Army. At college he contributed short stories to the college monthly, The Purple, graduated with the class of 1948, and then took his M. A. at Harvard, where he worked under Professor Albert Guerard, Jr., in the Modern Novel. This is his first story to appear in the Atlantic.
Father and I
PÄR LAGERKVIST, who received the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature, is Sweden’s foremost writer, Novelist, poet, and playwrigh, he is the author of many books, and two of his novels have been translated and published in the United States, The Dwarf and Barrabas. This story of childhood teas translated by Alan Blair. Critics in Sweden and elsewhere recognize Lagerkvist as one of the most powerful literary figures on the European scene.
Change of Plan
Little has been written about motor racing which can match, in zest and authentic detail, KEN PURDY’S first short story in a field which has long been his hobby, Atlantic readers will remember his recent articles on the Vanderbilt Cup race and the Indianapolis “500.”Mr. Purdy is the editor of True, and his book on high-performance cars, Kings of the Road, has just been published by Atlantic Little, Brown.