First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic\u2019s Books section:<\/p>\n
This shape-shifting character is an avatar for the author herself. Lockwood also traveled to Scotland (and wrote about it in <\/a>The Atlantic<\/a>); she, too, had an intense bout of COVID with a weeks-long fever and lingering symptoms. Bekah Waalkes, in her review of the book<\/a>, writes that the disease gives the protagonist the sense, \u201clike a changeling\u201d\u2014an image that crops up frequently in the book\u2014that she \u201chas been taken and replaced by someone new.\u201d In the novel, Lockwood writes of the illness: \u201cHad it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?\u201d Her character becomes not only a sicker version of herself but also a being who invents words, experiences strange connections, and makes wholly new art.<\/p>\n The possibility of personal transformation is a long-standing interest of Lockwood\u2019s. The essay set in Scotland was adapted from her introduction to a new edition of Virginia Woolf\u2019s To the Lighthouse, and sees Lockwood, her mother, and her husband tracking down Woolf\u2019s presence on the Isle of Skye, on which that novel is set. Lockwood describes a sense of potential in Woolf\u2019s portrait of the Ramsay family. Its matriarch\u2019s \u201cwork is to make people magnificent,\u201d she writes, \u201cto make them believe in themselves, make them think they can do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Lockwood, too, imagines being a different person in Scotland, writing \u201ceverything familiar was a bit different there: fruit, flowers, ourselves.\u201d She and her mother, uncharacteristically, buy a large melon. \u201cMaybe this was the place where we would finally be the people who would crack open a melon for breakfast,\u201d she muses, but they never do. Staying the same can be a disappointment\u2014\u201cWe do not live the lives that we mean to live, in those elevated moments in the produce section,\u201d she writes. In the novel, the long illness that her avatar experiences is unwelcome and unpleasant\u2014but it\u2019s also a catalyst for metamorphosis. The author approaches that intense change as an opportunity for her character to meet a new person, and does so with curiosity, open-mindedness, and humor.<\/p>\n Patricia Lockwood\u2019s Mind-Opening Experience of Long COVID<\/strong><\/p>\n By Bekah Waalkes<\/p>\n In her new novel, the author captures the strangeness of ordinary life for the chronically ill.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n What to Read<\/b><\/p>\n The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed<\/strong><\/a>, by John McPhee<\/strong><\/p>\n Pilots get most of the public credit for a flight\u2019s successes\u2014but they couldn\u2019t go anywhere without the behind-the-scenes heroes: engineers. McPhee has a rare gift for stepping into the astonishing obsessions of seemingly ordinary working people; here, he uses it to immerse the reader in a decades-long quest to build an entirely new type of aircraft. That potential vehicle, shaped like the titular pumpkin seed, was imagined as a combination of dirigible and airplane. Its siren call, as McPhee shows, was sometimes all-consuming, even life-destroying. In a saga that reaches from the Civil War to the 1970s, one acolyte after another grew convinced that he (this affliction appears to target men exclusively) would be the one who conquered the engineering challenge that had theretofore led only to ruin. Did anyone finally succeed? The fact that you aren\u2019t reading these words in the passenger compartment of a dirigible-airplane hybrid gives you a clue, but McPhee\u2019s storytelling makes readers hope that the mission will somehow pan out. \u2014 Jeff Wise<\/p>\n From our list: Six books to read before you get to the airport<\/a><\/p>\n Out Next Week<\/b><\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda Pick a Color<\/a>, by Souvankham Thammavongsa<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda The Future of Truth<\/a>, by Werner Herzog<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda Every Screen on the Planet<\/a>, by Emily Baker-White<\/p>\n Your Weekend Read<\/strong> The Trouble With Bad Bunny\u2019s Puerto Rico Takeover<\/strong><\/p>\n By Valerie Trapp<\/p>\n Yet Bad Bunny\u2019s decision to host his shows in San Juan also had an uneasy layer of irony baked into it. By dubbing the event \u201cI don\u2019t want to leave,\u201d he also necessarily meant You all have to come here. This travel prerequisite entails complexity for a place like Puerto Rico, which is already struggling with water shortages, the aftermath of Hurricane Erin, and rising housing prices due in part to the development of luxury rentals for tourists. (Tourism reportedly accounts for about<\/a> 2 percent of Puerto Rico\u2019s GDP, though other<\/a> sources suggest this number could be larger; real estate and rentals are also billed as the second-largest contributor to Puerto Rico\u2019s economy, at 19 percent.) Puerto Rico is just one of many places\u2014among them Hawaii, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic\u2014that are caught in a tourism trade-off: weighing the economic benefits and jobs that the industry can bring against its possible threats to cultural preservation<\/a>, the environment<\/a>, and housing markets, among other concerns.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n![\"Photograph](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1758913585_462_original.png\")
Leslie Ryann McKellar \/ The New York Times \/ Redux<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1758913592_332_original.jpg\")
Quique Cabanillas for The Atlantic<\/p>\n