Who Came Up With That?
Contrary to what we think of as intellectual property, most ideas are difficult to trace back to one human mind.
Fiction
Books
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The Questionable Triumph of the ‘Baling Wire Hippies’
Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was seen as a countercultural milestone, but his new book reveals his alliances with the powerful.
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.
Is Cohabitation the Feminist Future?
Stories about women living together are proliferating—and offering alternative visions to the nuclear family.
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 Green-Broke Stud
An ATLANTICcontributor whose short stories and articles have appeared in many magazines, Tom Mayer now lives in Mexico, where he is working on a novel. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship last spring, he is, at the age of twenty-one, one of the youngest American authors ever selected for this honor.
The Heat of the Sun
This new narrative by one of today’s classic storytellers will appear in a collection of stories and tales entitled THE HEAT OF THE SUN,being published this month by Atlantic - Little, Brown.
Mrs. Beneker
Although she has worked as a newspaper reporter and written a travel book and two children’s books, Violet Weingarten attempts fiction for the first time in this story about a woman who is wiser than she knows. The author was born in San Francisco, grew up in New York, graduated from Cornell, and now lives in a New York suburb.
Last Stop Before the Carbarn
McAndless, the hero of this new story by Ralph Maloney, got to be World’s Best Bartender not through mere shake-and-stir skill, but because he was something of the autocrat at the barstool. With Mr. Maloney’s talented hand to limn him, McAndless keeps his aplomb right up to Ihe Last Nightcap.
The Story of Jorkel Hayforks
A graduate in English of Edinburgh University, Mr. Brown lives and works in the Orkney Islands. His third book of poems, THE YEAR OF THE WHALE,was published in England last summer, and a book of short stories is scheduled to appear this year.
The Best Man
A diligent accumulation of saloon know-how nourishes Mr. Maloney’s writings about booze and bars and the characters who frequent same. The author attended Harvard, served in the Merchant Marine, in the Army, and on Madison Avenue before turning to writing. The Atlantic Monthly Press will soon, publish his light novel about the great days of bootlegging.
The Bee Tree
A Tennessean whose short stories were first published in the pages of the ATLANTIC, Jesse Hill Ford is the author of the novel THE LIBERATION OF LORD BYRON JONES, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection last summer. Mr. Ford spent the aulunm months as a fellow at Wesleyan s Center for Advanced Studies in Connecticut.
Shabos Nahamu
Isaac Babel, who died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1940, was perhaps the greatest Russian short-story writer since Chekhov. The following tale, here translated by Max Hayward, first appeared in a Moscow daily in 1918 and was republished in ZNAMYAin 1964. “Shabos nahamu” is the Hebrew “Sabbath of Comfort,” on which, after a period of lamentation for the Destruction of the Temple, the rabbi consoles the synagogue congregation by reading more cheerful passages from the Prophets.
The Boiler Room
A desolate army base in upstate New York is the setting for this extraordinary story of a troubled young soldier who presides, helplessly, over his own disintegration. The author, who makes his fiction debut with this Atlantic “First,” is Rudolph Wurlitzer, a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker, veteran, and one-time student at Columbia University. A free-lance writer for films and television, Wurlitzer is at work on a novel.
The Tour
A short-story writer who made her initial appearance in these pages, May Dikeman won the Atlantic “First” prize in 1961. Her two subsequent stories, “ The Sound of Young Laughter" and “The Woman Across the Street,” were selected for the Martha Foley collection.