Heat Wave

"The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama... Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion." Picked by Atlantic Deputy Editor Jane Yong Kim

Toy Fights: A Boyhood

"It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth." Picked by Atlantic staff writer James Parker

Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold

"Babalola’s story collection updates and retells romantic myths and fables from a bevy of cultures, tossing a reader into the richly imagined world of characters..." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo

Friday Black

"Friday Black presents a warped reflection of our own reality that feels both horrifying and clarifying." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Lenika Cruz

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power

"It’s a riveting critique of the first family of 20th-century liberalism..." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer

Travels in HyperReality

"In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused and appalled by American maximalism." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber

The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life

"Clark recounts the lives of the Lamalerans with a deep respect, while also spinning a wondrous, thrilling story out of their struggles..." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

"Rendered with irony and based on skillful scholarship, Jähner’s book describes both a democratic rebirth and a moral evasion, uncomfortably and inextricably linked." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer

Francisco

"Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Maya Chung

Elena Knows

"She describes Elena’s minute-by-minute experience so meticulously that I was almost able to comprehend—even just for a moment—the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once." Picked by Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill

My Men

"The universe is a live wire in the hands of Byrnhild, later called Bella, later called Belle Gunness, in Kielland’s short, electric novel." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo

The Afterlives

"No matter how surreal things become, Pierce implies, people will keep moving forward in much the same way, living humdrum little lives together, wondering and hoping in the face of existential mystery." Picked by Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

"Woolf’s daring experiment to find out whether 'the inside of the mind,' as she put it in her notebook, 'can be made luminous.'" Picked by Atlantic literary editor Ann Hulbert

Her First American

"The originality of this love story between two outsiders in 1950s New York City, Carter Bayoux and Ilka Weissnix, cannot be overstated." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman

The Stone Face

"Trapped by a dizzying moral question, Simeon is forced to confront the shifting realities of identity and racial allegiance as he fights the personal demons that have followed him across the ocean." Picked by Atlantic associate creative director Oliver Munday

Hotel Du Lac: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)

"The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else..." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert

The Guest

"Alex, the protagonist of Cline’s second novel, is an escort in her early 20s... She’s broke, with a busted phone and nowhere to stay; she survives only by taking advantage of everyone who crosses her path." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Maya Chung

Quietly Hostile: Essays

"No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

"Grann simultaneously reconstructs history while telling a tale that is as propulsive and adventure-filled as any potboiler." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman

The Late Americans

"The connections between Taylor’s multiple protagonists seem alternately random, doomed, and deeply romantic—much like the conditions that tie them to their creativity..." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Nicole Acheampong