Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
It’s beginning to be that time of year in the Penny Press, the infamous season of year-end book-lists. And since I’m the proud proprietor of the most authoritative of those lists (if I do say so myself)(and I do), I’m always irresistibly drawn to them wherever I find them – even if it’s in the [...]
Read MoreFive remarkable men came together in 19th century St. Petersburg to challenge each other, compete with each other, inspire each other, and encourage each other - and some quite remarkable music resulted
Read MoreOur book today is a masterpiece so ubiquitous it’s often completely overlooked: The Norton Anthology of English Literature–although as soon as I say that, I have to qualify it. Not qualify the ‘masterpiece’ part, of course (if I could be wrong about that part, I’d shutter Stevereads and start a beauty-tutorial channel on YouTube), but [...]
Read MoreThe near- infinite abundance of the Internet may seem incredibly alluring, but in his new book David Mikics argues that it's eating away at our ability to appreciate fully what we read. He offers rules and admonitions, as you might expect
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are, I bitterly concede, necessary compromises. Surely one such is the 1989 Selected Poems volume of Robert Browning, edited by Daniel Karlin, who rather optimistically writes in his Introduction that he “tried to strike a balance between the poems for which Browning is best known (but which are not always his best) [...]
Read MoreThe open frontier of self-publishing attracts a wide variety of pioneers - fiercely individual storytellers who for one reason or another have chosen a different path to realizing their writing dreams. One such pioneer is Jack Merridew, who at age 20 is already the author of two self-published works of fiction - and a successful YouTube creator as well. Open Letters talks with him about the brave new world of promoting your own dreams.
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics look at first glance like a dream come true. Take the immense 1996 translation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo by Robin Buss: if you set it down next to, for example, the most popular paperback reprint of the book from twenty years ago, they hardly even look related: the [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics try, with adorable flat-footedness, to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon in order to reach those ever-elusive unconverted readers. It’s an inherently silly thing for Penguin Classics to do, since theirs are the books that created the zeitgeist in the first place; in a perfect world, our reading culture would be attentively watching [...]
Read MoreIt's an act of aggression in which the victim is the perpetrator, and it's a crime for which the criminal cannot be punished: it's suicide, and statistics show we're in the middle of an epidemic of it. A thoughtful new book lays out the case for sticking around.
Read MoreDC Comics’ “New 52” company-wide reboot hit some of their flagship characters harder than others. The venerable WWII-era Justice Society was retconned right out of existence; warm-hearted primary-color Superman became a brooding, disaffected Dr. Manhattan-in-a-cape; Captain Marvel lost his mind – when teenager Billy Batson says his magic word nowadays, all he gets is a [...]
Read MoreAmerican diplomats and Foreign Service workers travel for America, negotiate for America, cheerlead for America, and sometimes die for America - a magnificent new book gives them the sweeping historical account they've always deserved.
Read MoreA new book by Brad Stone on Amazon.com: does it make nice with the online Goliath, or brandish a slingshot?
Read MoreOur book today is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, a bristling, muscular, mazy haphazard cathedral of opinion erected by Clive James, that grinning ombudsman of the Republic of Letters. Cultural Amnesia takes its readers through an alphabet of ideas, and a look at the Table of Contents gives a great picture [...]
Read MoreOur book today is one of those gems that turn up regularly on the outdoor bargain-carts at my beloved Brattle Bookshop: it’s an old Dover paperback from 1971 called The Best of Gluyas Williams, with only a totally perfunctory Foreward by Charles Dana Gibson and a totally perfunctory Preface by Robert Benchley separating the reader [...]
Read MoreA big new volume studies Napoleon Bonaparte from the peak of his power to the last days of his final exile
Read MoreA born warrior striving to become a refined gentleman, or a refined gentleman striving to learn a warrior's ways? A new book looks at Washington the military commander
Read MoreA satisfyingly literary core of The New Yorker this week, which is always pleasing and this time helped to compensate for certain lacks of satisfaction found elsewhere in the 11 November issue. It was great fun, for instance, to read Dan Chiasson’s nice long look at the poet Marianne Moore and to read his generally [...]
Read MoreThey've always been among us, those rare individuals we call geniuses - but the distinction's meaning has subtly altered over the centuries. It's a big, interesting subject, boiled down by Darrin McMahon into a short, interesting book
Read MoreOur book today is a little pamphlet-sized thing newly published by DC Comics and triple-titled Superman Man of Steel Believe, collecting ten quick backup stories taken from various Superman comics titles over the last fifteen years. The cover features a little logo reminding readers that the character of Superman is celebrating the 75th anniversary of [...]
Read MoreOne of the signature ironies of modern-day print book reviewing is on full display in the November 21st New York Review of Books, and since this particular irony irritates me, I was on edge all during my krocan peceny na slanine lunch. The irony in question here will be familiar to every owner of a [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.