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.
A Buffalo Named Woodrow
A native Texan, DILLON ANDERSON established himself as one of the ablest young lawyers in Houston before he took time off for his fiction. In 1951, we published his first book, I and Claudie, a salty Texas narrative of two happy wanderers who fortunately do not take themselves or their victims too seriously. Clint Hightower and his oxlike companion have adventured their way in and out of the oil country, Texas politics, hurricanes, revivals, and state fairs — and now they are off again.
The Trouper
An American novelist of Norwegian stock, NORMAN MATSON TELLS US that he was born in the shadow of a factory in an industrial town in the Middle West and raised in a working-class district of San Francisco. After a short tour in railroading, he turned to journalism, working on California labor newspapers. He moved East from paper to paper, landing eventually in New York, where in 1926 he published his first novel, a fantasy entitled Flecker’s Magic, which was appreciatively reviewed by E. M. Forster.
Planting Pheasants
Before entering college in 1946, BENJAMIN DE MOTT worked for seven years at a variety of jobs in downtown New York, downtown Baltimore, in the army, and as a newspaperman and free-lance writer in If ashington, D.C. He attended Johns Hopkins and George Washington Universities and recently received a Ph.D. from Harvard. Mr. De Mott is now an instructor of English at Amherst College.
A Great Reckoning in a Little Room
GEOFFREY BUSH is a writer who has lived most of his twenty-four years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1950 he was graduated summa cum laude from Harvard; the next two years he spent at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; and now he is back at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He has recently completed a critical study of the idea of nature in Shakespeare’s plays; and like so many other young American writers who have made a temporary home in universities, he is trying to find out whether the creative and the academic life can be reconciled. This story first appeared in the undergraduate magazine, the Harvard Advocate.
Groucho Sent Me
KYLE CRICHTON was for fifteen years a staff writer on Collier’s, specializing in stage and screen subjects. He is the author of a biography of the Marx Brothers, and a novel recently was published by Crown.
The Girl on the Bus
WILLIAM SANSOM “can make you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell to his order,”wrote Eudora Welty when she had finished reading South with its lustrous descriptions of the Mediterranean. From Mr. Sansom’s new volume, The Passionate North, a collection of short stories drawn from the harsh panorama of Scandinavia and the Western Isles of Scotland, the Atlantic has selected two narratives. The book will be published this month by Harcourt, Brace.
A World of Glass
WILLIAM SANSOM “can make you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell to his order,”wrote Eudora Welty when she read South with its lustrous descriptions of the Mediterranean. From Mr. Sunsom’s new volume, The Passionate North, a collection of stories drawn from the harsh panorama of Scandinavia and the Western Isles of Scotland, the Atlantic has selected two narratives. The book will be published by Harcourt, Brace next month.