What Very Different Places Have in Common

2026-03-20 · The Atlantic

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

Visit albergomalica.it for more information.

At a recent event, the novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he’d written. He picked Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn’s 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it is set in Manila during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn’t help thinking of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, as he read it. “I thought: She knows Kingston,” he said. What he meant was that her book helped him better see the beauty, thrum, and chaos of the Jamaican capital, which would become the setting for his Booker Prize–winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Gary Shteyngart made a similar discovery about the slipperiness of literary inspiration when he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for The Atlantic, seeking traces of the Nobel Prize–winning author J. M. Coetzee. He was hunting for clues to decipher the author’s parable-like novels in the homes Coetzee had lived in and the streets he had walked—but Shteyngart learned more from discovering what the author chose to leave out.

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

Shteyngart’s article is the latest in The Atlantic’s series “The Writer’s Way,” in which journalists and novelists follow the trails of beloved authors in the places that formed their work. Though previous essays in the series have focused on novels that vividly evoke their settings, Shteyngart’s task was different, because of Coetzee’s elliptical descriptions of the city where he grew up. The author, whose novels span South Africa’s transition from brutal apartheid to reconciliation, deliberately blurred the details of neighborhoods, people, and even the one characteristic that determined roles and rights in apartheid-era South Africa: race. Readers are often left to imagine what group a particular character belongs to, what era the story is set in, or which factions are warring over his mythic or apocalyptic landscapes. One scholar told Shteyngart that Coetzee’s impressions were filtered through a “ripple in the glass,” obscuring the details that tend to anchor realist novels.

Coetzee, who moved to Australia in 2002, a year before he became the second South African Nobel laureate, has also written about other places—and also portrayed them through ripples in the glass. What links all the novels is that, though they are written by a white, anti-apartheid South African, they are about how people treat one another everywhere. My favorite example is among his most enigmatic books. Waiting for the Barbarians, published in 1980, is frequently read as a critique of colonialism and, more specifically, of his home country in the apartheid era. But the work contains virtually no clues about its setting; we know only that the magistrate narrating the story oversees a colonial outpost many hundreds of miles away from the center of an empire. We might be on the far outskirts of overstretched Rome or deep in Russian-occupied Mongolia. Any reader of history could name a dozen regimes that contained the same human forces Coetzee chronicles: corruption, cruelty, hubris, greed, and the occasional act of moral heroism.

The main character becomes disillusioned as imperial soldiers, fearing an imminent invasion of their garrison, begin planning an offensive against the local “barbarians.” As reinforcements arrive from the capital, instituting a brutal new order and subjugating the native population, a key irony emerges: The empire’s special forces act far more barbarous than any enemy seen in the book. When the narrator resists the new colonel and becomes yet another victim of the government, the parallel to South Africa’s long struggle for equality and justice becomes clear. But what makes this a great novel—and what makes Coetzee a great novelist—is that it is not tied to any one place. It is about what humans do to one another, across history and across the world, and what it means to hope that this state of being might one day change.

Kent Andreasen for The Atlantic

The City Where Coetzee Is God

By Gary Shteyngart

Searching for the Nobel laureate in Cape Town, the city he left behind

Read the full article.

What to Read

Clutch, by Emily Nemens

The five women at the center of Nemens’s second novel—Carson, Gregg, Hillary, Bella, and Reba—have just turned 40. In the months after a celebratory weekend getaway to Palm Springs, middle age hits hard; each friend sees her life either begin to fall apart or finally coalesce. Each comes from a different background: Carson is a Brooklyn-based writer finishing her highly personal second novel, Gregg is a feminist politician in Austin, Hillary is a doctor in Chicago whose husband struggles with addiction, Bella is an ambitious Manhattan-based litigator in a teetering marriage, and Reba has recently left the corporate world and is facing infertility. But the questions they ask themselves and one another concerning the arcs of relationships, the experiences of motherhood, and the difficulties of having careers feel universal. Like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, and even top-tier Sex and the City episodes, this story casts a smart, sociological eye on ambitious American women’s experiences while also being a compulsive page-turner. — Rhian Sasseen

From our list: Six books that simply must be talked about

Out Next Week

📚 Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, by Rhae Lynn Barnes

📚 Open Space: From Earth to Eternity—The Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos, by David Ariosto

📚 A Beautiful Loan, by Mary Costello

Your Weekend Read Keith Vaughn / Christies Images / Bridgeman Images

Are They Still Your Friends if You Never See Them?

By Andrew McCarthy

Sam stopped strumming and looked at me. “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”

Sam didn’t mean it in a hurtful way. As far as he knew, it was a fair-enough assessment.

“I have friends,” I said. “I just don’t see them, but I know they’re there. And that’s enough.”

Sam considered me—probably knew I was full of it (even if I didn’t at the moment)—then graciously accepted my answer with a nod. But his comment stayed with me. What had happened to my friendships? Were they still there, as I had claimed? What did I get from my friends, and what did I have to offer them? I sipped my tea—it was cold.

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.

Read at source