The Atlantic: “…That quality of literature—and the criticism that helps make sense of it—is a large part of why we’re excited to be expanding books coverage at The Atlantic. Since its founding in 1857, this magazine “of Literature, Art, and Politics” has been home to great writing about the momentous books and literary debates of the day. It has championed generations of essayists and novelists and poets (though, in a huge oversight, it didn’t publish Dickinson until after her death). And it has run stories by James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, and Lauren Groff, to name just a few. Building on this strong base, we’ll be bringing you more of what we’ve always done, as well as some new offerings. Expect more book reviews and essays—plus provocative arguments, reported stories, profiles, original fiction and poetry, and, of course, recommendations for your every reading need. Why now? At first blush, books might not seem very apt at keeping up with the many challenges of our moment. But paradoxically, we might find ourselves turning more and more to books because they demand so much of our attention. Literature has a unique quality of slowing us down even as it widens our horizons. That makes it a particularly fantastic vessel for our era of distraction. Books are also a vehicle for the free expression of ideas, a value that this institution shares and that is under assault culturally and politically. One of the roles of The Atlantic, as our editor at large Cullen Murphy once said, is an obligation to tell “the big story that lurks, untold, behind the smaller ones that do get told.” Books serve this role too. The literary landscape today is full of such undertakings. Novelists are grappling, creatively, with the climate crisis, alleged predatory behavior, the future of work. Poets are taking on crucial questions of identity. Anthropologists are rethinking our assumptions about human social history, writ large. Earlier texts, too, when revisited, can offer historical context that resounds sharply decades later. Reading can show us, anew, the forces that shape our institutions, our beliefs, and our sense of self. It can expand the way we look at the world around us. At The Atlantic, our aim has been, and will be, to introduce readers to such books, old and new, and to engage with the ideas in them critically and inquisitively.”