Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our books today might seem like strange candidates for the category of “summer books,” since we naturally equate all things Sherlock Holmes with fog-bound London rather than sun-brightened Boston, but as I mentioned yesterday, an equally-important element of summer books is their feeling of ease, of being a home rather than a journey. I think […]
Read MoreOur books today speak and breathe of summer, because June traditionally ushers in the long march of summer in Boston. The days are longer, and usually, at least in June, the evenings slowly glide into fragrant, cool relief from the day’s heat, and something ineluctable changes just a bit in the mental atmosphere. Though I’ve […]
Read MoreThomas Piketty's great mountain of Gallic macro-economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was the hit of the Western world for one heady season. Then the parade moved on, and we were left, dazed and disheveled, wondering if we've been fed un truc de ouf. Our Peer Review attempts to sort out the l'affaire Piketty
Read MoreThe hands-down winner for Most Obnoxious Opening Paragraph for a Book Review This Week goes to New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball, reviewing Christopher Buckley’s new essay collection But Enough About You in the National Review: I’d known for years that Christopher Buckley was an amusing man. His novel Thank You for Smoking (1994), […]
Read MoreA rip-snorting new Penguin Classic gives us the memoir of a teenager who flew fighter planes during World War I
Read MoreOur book today is Medicus, the 2006 debut Roman murder mystery by Ruth Downie starring wry, brooding medical man Gaius Petreius Ruso, who’s chosen, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness, to respond to the death of his father and a painful divorce back in Rome by moving to the farthest reach of the Empire, distant Britannia, and […]
Read MoreOur books today are two oldies but goodies, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1909) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927) by J. Wright Duff, who labored over them for a huge chunk of his life and […]
Read MoreNaturally, Scott Sherman’s well-done article in The Nation on the parlous state of the university press grabbed my attention. Sherman writes about the roughly 100 university presses in the United States but concentrates especially on the vast majority of them that don’t rest on “the feathery cushion of an endowment” but rather face the hurly-burly […]
Read MoreOur book today is a delightful curiosity called Genji Days by Edward Seidenseticker, whose 1976 translation of Murakami Shikibu’s great epic novel The Tale of Genji was as thoroughly the definitive Genji of his generation as Arthur Waley’s had been for the previous generation – or, indeed, Royall Tyler’s 2001 version is currently. For thousands […]
Read MoreOur book today is Stan Cutler’s 1994 mystery novel Shot on Location, a snapping-good Hollywood whodunit starring the unlikely duo of fifty-something “fixer” tough guy Rayford Goodman and twenty-something gay writer Mark Bradley – a duo who might never have met each other except that Mark Bradley’s seedy publisher, Pendragon Press, has secured the […]
Read MoreOur book today is This Thing of Darkness, a whopping-long 2005 historical novel by Harry Thompson about the fateful voyage of the HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego in 1828. The ship was captained by 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, and of course its most famous passenger was the young amateur naturalist Charles Darwin. But Thompson’s novel […]
Read MoreThe 1990s came rushing back into the spotlight for me today in the Penny Press, first in the latest Vanity Fair, which had not only an entertainingly angry piece by Lili Anolik on the whole culture-altering media circus of the O. J. Simpson trial, and then a piece written by Monica Lewinsky, whose scandal with […]
Read MoreThe rest of the world may be unpredictable (earthquakes, tidal waves, polar ice-caps summarily melting, a snowstorm and a tornado on the same day in Colorado, 40-degree temperature drops in Boston in a 10-hour period, etc.), but one thing can always be counted on in a bookworm’s life: the need for acquiring more books. I […]
Read MoreOur book today is Michael Pearce’s 1991 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, the fourth (and my favorite) in Pearce’s long-running series of novels set in Edwardian Cairo and starring a blandly resolute Welshman named Gareth Owen in his capacity as the Mamur Zapt, a strange kind of hybrid police detective-Secret Police Czar […]
Read MoreThe latest Rolling Stone serves up a double-dish of delights for all those rabid fans out there of HBO’s Game of Thrones - and the books that inspired the show: first, there’s an interview with pouting cover-boy Kit Harington (who was just on the cover of GQ and half a dozen other magazines, in every accompanying interview reciting the […]
Read MoreOur book today is James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, the 2012 entry in his “Grantchester Mysteries,” his series of stories set in the picturesque 1950s English hamlet of Grantchester and starring thirty-something vicar Sidney Chambers, who’s a kind of mild-mannered amateur clerical sleuth in the tradition of C. K. Chesterton’s Father […]
Read MoreOur book today is a slight little thing: a 1966 novel by Naguib Mahfouz with the title Tharthara Fawq al Nil, here translated into English by Frances Liardet as Adrift on the Nile. I’ve recently reread it as the slow, tidal process of my re-evaluation of this author works its way through my Brattle buying habits. […]
Read MoreFor our latest Great Moment, we harken back to the heady days of 1987, to Thor #380, with writing and page-layouts by the mighty Walt Simonson and very able artwork finishes by Sal Buscema. The issue is in many ways the climax of a storyline that had gone on for a year. In a fit […]
Read MoreOur book today is something simply called Ancient Egypt, a slim 1942 volume from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; it began life as a fairly straightforward guidebook to the museum’s vast and impressive collection of artwork and artifacts from ancient Egypt, which a later editor very accurately characterized as “not the most extensive […]
Read MoreOur book today is Angelo Maria Ripellino’s utterly wonderful 1973 book Praga Magica, published in 1994 by Picador as Magic Prague, marvelously translated by David Newton Martinelli. It’s a forlorn love-song to the weird city of Prague, written in white heat at the height of Ripellino’s powers, and it’s as beautiful and sui generis a […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.