This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe. But after that long literary detour, he returned to the land of his birth in his new novel, The Disappearers—which is set primarily in Kingston and follows a group of characters, all queer Jamaican men, who meet while rehearsing a play that will never be seen.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Hard-luck men in hardscrabble towns
• “Disunion,” a short story by Kurt Andersen
• A deeply layered novel about masculinity
• “Stance,” a poem by Deborah Garrison

For this group, which gathers in secret in 1988, seeing and being seen are matters of life and death. The Kingston they inhabit is murderously homophobic, and accordingly, the novel can be quite bleak. But The Disappearers offers some delights too. Recently, in her article about the book for The Atlantic, Stephanie Burt noted that “the novel opens up many pleasures for literary readers,” who may recognize the numerous titles and references sprinkled throughout. I was deeply affected by how, almost universally, the characters seek out anything that proves that gay life exists on a larger scale. Lowbrow works, such as porn films and magazines, are most accessible; Playgirl and Hustler are name-checked. The songs of Boy George, Sylvester, and Prince are lifelines—the homoerotic cover of Prince’s 1988 album, Lovesexy, is an especially powerful beacon. Many of the characters are well read, and they name-drop gay novels such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance and E. M. Forster’s Maurice. For one of the men in particular, the type of hustling, defiant gay life that John Rechy describes in his nonfiction book The Sexual Outlaw is pivotal.

The play they put on, a 1967 drama called Fortune and Men’s Eyes, explores homosexuality among a group of prisoners. Some of its characters see sex as a means for gaining or establishing power; others, as a convenient way to access pleasure. Some are what a modern audience might recognize as gay, whereas others choose partners largely because of their proximity. The cast share the characters’ disparate attitudes toward queerness. But in the Jamaica they live in, there is no room for nuance; any man seen as homosexual is a target for violence. Brutality will soon come to the rehearsal room.

In a way, James has written a gay novel about the uses of a gay novel. When his characters invoke Oscar Wilde and Edmund White, Hadrian and Michelangelo, they’re proving, to themselves and to the reader, that queer life existed long before they came around. But James is not an unskeptical cheerleader for the healing power of visibility and representation. The Disappearers’ major theme, after all, is that being recognized can be a bad thing: Owning these books is a hazard. Buying Lovesexy as a man in 1988 Kingston invites vigilantism. Staging Fortune and Men’s Eyes puts its cast and crew in danger.

So why try to do it? The director and ringleader, Havelock Titus, asks himself this question more than a decade after those hopeful rehearsals. He knew, even at the time, that the effort was a risk. He still doesn’t know “what success would have meant,” because the unstaged play “never had the chance to become a failure.” But Havelock knows on some level that he did it because, just like those who came before him, he wanted to create some kind of evidence that gay men communed and survived in his time and place. In short, he was tired of being erased.

Marlon James Returns to Realism, and to Jamaica

By Stephanie Burt

In his new novel, gay men struggle to escape violence in Kingston.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Age of Reform, by Richard Hofstadter

History can’t fully explain the present or predict the future, but it can help us understand the patterns of contemporary politics and the likely paths ahead. In 1955, Hofstadter, one of the great American historians of the 20th century, published The Age of Reform—a political and social history of the years 1890 to 1940, the period of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal. Rapid technological change, monopoly power, deep inequality, endemic corruption, mass immigration, nativist demagogues, the transformation of both political parties, repeated efforts at reform, recurring spasms of reaction: Perhaps no other age so resembles our own. Hofstadter is brilliant at analyzing types that feel quite familiar to us today—the crusading urban progressive, the small-town conspiracy theorist. He was a liberal who sympathized with the passion for progress while unsentimentally diagnosing its illiberal ideas and motives. The fevered moralism of that age seems a long way from the paralyzing cynicism of ours. But reading Hofstadter will remind you that reform and reaction not only follow each other, but also often coexist in the same moment; neither ever has the last word. Americans are always dreaming of a better country, and some have actually made it so.  — George Packer

From our list: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?

Out Next Week

📚 Finding Renée Richards, by Julie Kliegman

📚 The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, by Joby Warrick

📚 The Book of Chuck, by LaToya Watkins

Your Weekend Read

Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

By Walt Hunter

Universities find themselves in a surprising position. The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline. The unlikely hero of the day is the blue book, sales of which are up by as much as 80 percent for some universities since 2023.

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe. But after that long literary detour, he returned to the land of his birth in his new novel, The Disappearers—which is set primarily in Kingston and follows a group of characters, all queer Jamaican men, who meet while rehearsing a play that will never be seen.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Hard-luck men in hardscrabble towns
• “Disunion,” a short story by Kurt Andersen
• A deeply layered novel about masculinity
• “Stance,” a poem by Deborah Garrison

For this group, which gathers in secret in 1988, seeing and being seen are matters of life and death. The Kingston they inhabit is murderously homophobic, and accordingly, the novel can be quite bleak. But The Disappearers offers some delights too. Recently, in her article about the book for The Atlantic, Stephanie Burt noted that “the novel opens up many pleasures for literary readers,” who may recognize the numerous titles and references sprinkled throughout. I was deeply affected by how, almost universally, the characters seek out anything that proves that gay life exists on a larger scale. Lowbrow works, such as porn films and magazines, are most accessible; Playgirl and Hustler are name-checked. The songs of Boy George, Sylvester, and Prince are lifelines—the homoerotic cover of Prince’s 1988 album, Lovesexy, is an especially powerful beacon. Many of the characters are well read, and they name-drop gay novels such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance and E. M. Forster’s Maurice. For one of the men in particular, the type of hustling, defiant gay life that John Rechy describes in his nonfiction book The Sexual Outlaw is pivotal.

The play they put on, a 1967 drama called Fortune and Men’s Eyes, explores homosexuality among a group of prisoners. Some of its characters see sex as a means for gaining or establishing power; others, as a convenient way to access pleasure. Some are what a modern audience might recognize as gay, whereas others choose partners largely because of their proximity. The cast share the characters’ disparate attitudes toward queerness. But in the Jamaica they live in, there is no room for nuance; any man seen as homosexual is a target for violence. Brutality will soon come to the rehearsal room.

In a way, James has written a gay novel about the uses of a gay novel. When his characters invoke Oscar Wilde and Edmund White, Hadrian and Michelangelo, they’re proving, to themselves and to the reader, that queer life existed long before they came around. But James is not an unskeptical cheerleader for the healing power of visibility and representation. The Disappearers’ major theme, after all, is that being recognized can be a bad thing: Owning these books is a hazard. Buying Lovesexy as a man in 1988 Kingston invites vigilantism. Staging Fortune and Men’s Eyes puts its cast and crew in danger.

So why try to do it? The director and ringleader, Havelock Titus, asks himself this question more than a decade after those hopeful rehearsals. He knew, even at the time, that the effort was a risk. He still doesn’t know “what success would have meant,” because the unstaged play “never had the chance to become a failure.” But Havelock knows on some level that he did it because, just like those who came before him, he wanted to create some kind of evidence that gay men communed and survived in his time and place. In short, he was tired of being erased.

Marlon James Returns to Realism, and to Jamaica

By Stephanie Burt

In his new novel, gay men struggle to escape violence in Kingston.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Age of Reform, by Richard Hofstadter

History can’t fully explain the present or predict the future, but it can help us understand the patterns of contemporary politics and the likely paths ahead. In 1955, Hofstadter, one of the great American historians of the 20th century, published The Age of Reform—a political and social history of the years 1890 to 1940, the period of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal. Rapid technological change, monopoly power, deep inequality, endemic corruption, mass immigration, nativist demagogues, the transformation of both political parties, repeated efforts at reform, recurring spasms of reaction: Perhaps no other age so resembles our own. Hofstadter is brilliant at analyzing types that feel quite familiar to us today—the crusading urban progressive, the small-town conspiracy theorist. He was a liberal who sympathized with the passion for progress while unsentimentally diagnosing its illiberal ideas and motives. The fevered moralism of that age seems a long way from the paralyzing cynicism of ours. But reading Hofstadter will remind you that reform and reaction not only follow each other, but also often coexist in the same moment; neither ever has the last word. Americans are always dreaming of a better country, and some have actually made it so.  — George Packer

From our list: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?

Out Next Week

📚 Finding Renée Richards, by Julie Kliegman

📚 The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, by Joby Warrick

📚 The Book of Chuck, by LaToya Watkins

Your Weekend Read

Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

By Walt Hunter

Universities find themselves in a surprising position. The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline. The unlikely hero of the day is the blue book, sales of which are up by as much as 80 percent for some universities since 2023.

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

“How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that. I was familiar with Michel Foucault, partly from college coursework but largely from a popular meme that features his most famous concept, the panopticon. I know about Roland Barthes and the death of the author. I know that Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze are names that I should know.

“Not good,” I told him.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Icarus in the faculty lounge
• Someone is mysteriously snapping up used books around the world.
• What if Freud was right?
• “Out Here,” a collection of poems by the Black Seed Writers Group

I could read their works for myself, of course. I could pick up Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at any one of the college bookstores that serve four major universities in my city. But frankly—and I don’t think I’m alone in this—I’d rather not. My preference as a busy adult is to begin my approach to foundational, complicated ideas with the help of a particular kind of book: the intellectual biography.

The structuralists would hate this. Lynn Steger Strong makes exactly that point in an Atlantic essay published this week about a new group biography of these thinkers. I may be oversimplifying their ideas (as Strong writes, any “smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity”), but in general, they disregarded biography as a source of useful information about art; Barthes, especially, rejected literary criticism that drew on an author’s life to unlock the meaning of their work. “There was only the text, over which the writer had little control,” Strong explains. “Even the self was ultimately an unstable text.” This makes a biography of the cohort feel almost sacreligious. Emily Eakin’s new book, The Frenchmen, focuses on these men’s personal lives to illuminate their earthshaking writings. After finishing it, Strong wonders: “How could biography not be important?”

I agree. Important ideas don’t just come to Earth fully formed and then flow through their speakers; they’re influenced by the wider context in which they develop. Earlier this year, when I was curious about the life and work of Karl Marx, the first book I reached for wasn’t Capital. Instead, I read Francis Wheen’s 2000 biography of the man—yes, I learned, he did ask Frederich Engels for money immediately after Engels told him that his beloved partner, Mary, had died. And yes, he really did spend ages in the British Museum’s reading room trying to squeeze as much information as possible into Capital (which is not to say that he didn’t miss anything). The biography also reminded me that Marx did not invent socialism; he was building on an intellectual tradition that predated him by decades.

I encourage readers to try this out for themselves. Back in 2022, Talya Zax recommended nine group biographies that explain not only the lives of their subjects but also how those individuals influenced other people and movements. Personally, I’m on to a new topic: I’m about five chapters into Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s forthcoming biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, and the world of 20th-century New York City—an environment that incubated hundreds of famous and influential leaders, including our current president—is unfolding before me.

How Theory Took Over the World

By Lynn Steger Strong

The French writers of the postwar era argued that the author’s life is irrelevant. Emily Eakin’s lively new book proves them wrong.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, by Peter Hook

The Haçienda in Manchester was a catalyst of the U.K. acid house scene in the late ’80s, and a prophecy foretold: “The haçienda must be built,” the Situationist poet Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953. Heeding these cryptic words some three decades later, the audacious (and well-read) impresario Tony Wilson opened the Haçienda together with the circle of post-punk musicians and designers involved with his label, Factory Records. Their attempt to decipher Chtcheglov’s mystical phrase lasted 15 years. Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. In this memoir of misbegotten business administration, Hook returns to the storied nights out that changed British culture even as they threatened to bankrupt him—and worse. Beset by gangs and guns, the Haçienda faltered in the ’90s despite clever-sounding schemes such as replacing the club’s security with the gangsters themselves. This is a scrapbook of utopian folly, yes, but also an insider’s look at what was, for a time, the wildest workplace on Earth.  — Andrew Holter

From our list: Five books about going out that are worth staying in for

Out Next Week

📚 Sunrise, by Téa Obreht

📚 Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn

📚 Under the Falls, by Richard Russo

Your Weekend Read

Do Not Paint Granite!

By Dorothy Robyn

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

“How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that. I was familiar with Michel Foucault, partly from college coursework but largely from a popular meme that features his most famous concept, the panopticon. I know about Roland Barthes and the death of the author. I know that Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze are names that I should know.

“Not good,” I told him.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Icarus in the faculty lounge
• Someone is mysteriously snapping up used books around the world.
• What if Freud was right?
• “Out Here,” a collection of poems by the Black Seed Writers Group

I could read their works for myself, of course. I could pick up Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at any one of the college bookstores that serve four major universities in my city. But frankly—and I don’t think I’m alone in this—I’d rather not. My preference as a busy adult is to begin my approach to foundational, complicated ideas with the help of a particular kind of book: the intellectual biography.

The structuralists would hate this. Lynn Steger Strong makes exactly that point in an Atlantic essay published this week about a new group biography of these thinkers. I may be oversimplifying their ideas (as Strong writes, any “smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity”), but in general, they disregarded biography as a source of useful information about art; Barthes, especially, rejected literary criticism that drew on an author’s life to unlock the meaning of their work. “There was only the text, over which the writer had little control,” Strong explains. “Even the self was ultimately an unstable text.” This makes a biography of the cohort feel almost sacreligious. Emily Eakin’s new book, The Frenchmen, focuses on these men’s personal lives to illuminate their earthshaking writings. After finishing it, Strong wonders: “How could biography not be important?”

I agree. Important ideas don’t just come to Earth fully formed and then flow through their speakers; they’re influenced by the wider context in which they develop. Earlier this year, when I was curious about the life and work of Karl Marx, the first book I reached for wasn’t Capital. Instead, I read Francis Wheen’s 2000 biography of the man—yes, I learned, he did ask Friedrich Engels for money immediately after Engels told him that his beloved partner, Mary, had died. And yes, he really did spend ages in the British Museum’s reading room trying to squeeze as much information as possible into Capital (which is not to say that he didn’t miss anything). The biography also reminded me that Marx did not invent socialism; he was building on an intellectual tradition that predated him by decades.

I encourage readers to try this out for themselves. Back in 2022, Talya Zax recommended nine group biographies that explain not only the lives of their subjects but also how those individuals influenced other people and movements. Personally, I’m on to a new topic: I’m about five chapters into Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s forthcoming biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, and the world of 20th-century New York City—an environment that incubated hundreds of famous and influential leaders, including our current president—is unfolding before me.

How Theory Took Over the World

By Lynn Steger Strong

The French writers of the postwar era argued that the author’s life is irrelevant. Emily Eakin’s lively new book proves them wrong.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, by Peter Hook

The Haçienda in Manchester was a catalyst of the U.K. acid house scene in the late ’80s, and a prophecy foretold: “The haçienda must be built,” the Situationist poet Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953. Heeding these cryptic words some three decades later, the audacious (and well-read) impresario Tony Wilson opened the Haçienda together with the circle of post-punk musicians and designers involved with his label, Factory Records. Their attempt to decipher Chtcheglov’s mystical phrase lasted 15 years. Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. In this memoir of misbegotten business administration, Hook returns to the storied nights out that changed British culture even as they threatened to bankrupt him—and worse. Beset by gangs and guns, the Haçienda faltered in the ’90s despite clever-sounding schemes such as replacing the club’s security with the gangsters themselves. This is a scrapbook of utopian folly, yes, but also an insider’s look at what was, for a time, the wildest workplace on Earth.  — Andrew Holter

From our list: Five books about going out that are worth staying in for

Out Next Week

📚 Sunrise, by Téa Obreht

📚 Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn

📚 Under the Falls, by Richard Russo

Your Weekend Read

Do Not Paint Granite!

By Dorothy Robyn

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.