We’re Emma Sarappo, Gal Beckerman, and Ellen Cushing, editors for The Atlantic, and we’re here to talk about our just-released Great American Novels list.

In seeking to identify a new American canon, we defined American as having first been published in the United States and within the past 100 years: a period that contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the satisfactions of genre fiction. Then we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—for their suggestions. From there,

we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and reconsidered until we landed on these 136 titles.
The list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before.

Read the full list here: https://theatln.tc/V57bT2jO