Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
I’ve had occasion to comment many times here at Stevereads about some of the contradictions that seem hard-wired into the particular magazine sub-genre of the lad-mag “men’s” titles. They routinely feature ‘back to basics’ articles teaching their audience of over-salaried douche-dudes how to strip away the clutter from their lives and live simply and organically, […]
Read MoreOur book today is another skimpy little thing, a 1973 Capra chapbook combining two essays by the crime fiction writer who worked under the pen name of Ross MacDonald, and although it fits in with our deep-breath respite from enormous whopping volumes, it’s also undeniable in this case that we probably don’t want this particular […]
Read MoreOur book today is a bit of an antidote to the massive doorstops we’ve been dealing with recently here on Stevereads: it’s The Fur Hat, a 120-page 1989 novella by caustic and sometimes brilliant Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, here translated into English by Susan Brownsberger. The book is a treat of hangdog sarcasm. It tells […]
Read MoreOur book today is another whopper from the days of the old manilla-covered Modern Library era: The Complete Poems of Keats & Shelley, for those times when you want pages and pages of these near-exact contemporaries all running together, rather than hunting up your Oxford completes or your Penguin selects. Although the heft of this […]
Read MoreOur book today is a biggie, a doorstop: it’s the combined volume Modern Library did of William Hickling Prescott‘s The History of the Conquest of Mexico and his The History of the Conquest of Peru. Prescott finished the first in 1843 and the second in 1847, and neither is exactly skimpy in terms of heft […]
Read MoreOur book today is a truly perennial classic, Bulfinch’s Mythology, a book that’s been consistently in print since it first appeared – and one of those curious items whose own author wouldn’t have recognized it. It’s a one-volume collection of three books by Thomas Bulfinch: The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858), […]
Read MoreOur book today is Viper, the latest Giovanni de Maurizio murder mystery from Europa Editions. It’s the sixth installment in the series starring sad, intense young Commissario Ricciardi of the 1930s Naples police force. The sub-title of this one is “No Resurrection for Commissario Ricciardi,” and fans of the series – among which in Boston […]
Read MoreThe sun was shining yesterday in Boston, which was so strange after the last 90 days that I looked at the city, seeing it with the fresh realization that Boston has managed to survive a genuine battering of storms and cold and storms and cold. It wasn’t an easy survival, of course, and it was […]
Read MoreOur book today is a truly beautiful thing from 2014, The David Foster Wallace Reader, a collaboration between Little, Brown and Wallace’s literary trust that aims to create a “Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, an essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallace’s work already and show those new to […]
Read MoreA little while ago, having been trapped indoors by ten-foot snow drifts for a week or two or three, I decided to spend my $5 coupon and go shopping at Book Outlet again, just the way all my favorite enthusiastic young BookTubers do! I browsed for a few days (it’s oddly time-consuming, clicking back through […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics open up windows on alien worlds, and they do so every bit as effectively as the very best sci-fi and fantasy, but through radically different means: by showing us what was, not what wasn’t. A perfect demonstration of this would be the slim and elegant new Penguin Classic edition of Tenzin Chogyel’s […]
Read MoreInk Chorus Our book today is one of the de facto Bibles of the Ink Chorus: Books of the Century, a 2000 update of the 1998 anthology of book reviews and author interviews from the first century of the New York Times Book Review, a great big book with a hideous cover, edited by Charles […]
Read MoreOur book today is Lamentation by C. J. Sansom, the latest of his books to feature the sleuthing adventures of his hunchback Tudor-era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, following Heartstone way back in 2010. This series began with the quietly wonderful 2003 novel Dissolution, and all the strengths so abundantly on display in that first book have […]
Read MoreThanks to the technical wizardry of Open Letters Monthly‘s newest editor, Robert Minto, March debuts a spiffy new look for Stevereads, its first top-to-bottom re-design in almost ten years! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d present a Stevereads alphabet to help orient the hordes of new readers Robert has unconditionally guaranteed me will be […]
Read MoreOur book today goes by a title Stevereads has already anointed as alluring: To Wake the Mangog! (I added the exclamation point that the book’s own packagers shamefully omitted) – it’s a thick volume in Marvel Comics’ ongoing “Epic Collection” series of color reprints from the archives. This is the fourth “Epic Collection” of Thor […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics were custom-made to be very handy for traveling, which makes them extra-poignant in the Boston of February 2015, in which nobody packs bags or quick satchels because travel of any kind is impossible and has been for many, many weeks. All flights into or out of Logan Airport have been cancelled, and […]
Read MoreOur books today comprise a small Stevereads landmark: my very first book-haul from Book Outlet! As some of you will know, I’m delighted to spend time watching all the enthusiastic young people (and a few old enough to know better!) over in the nerdy, inordinately friendly corner of YouTube known as “BookTube.” I love the […]
Read MoreNothing warms up the icy snowbound ventricles quite like a burst of outrage, and I got one of those recently when I encountered a block of pure editorial cowardice in the Penny Press. Specifically, it was in the 5 February 2015 issue of the London Review of Books (although the cover is misprinted […]
Read MoreOur book today is one we turn to with some bitterness: The Poetic Edda, or Elder Edda, that medieval treasure-house of Norse mythology. After a week of fawningly propitiating a certain Deity Who shall remain nameless, and after having it amount to squat as a vicious “snow hurricane” struck poor, shivering Boston just the same, […]
Read MoreSometimes, when it comes to propitiating the Deity, circumstances warrant going right to the top – and with poor wretched Boston staring wide-eyed at the latest ferocious oncoming “monster storm,” today seemed like one of those times. So with fear and trembling, I crept to my bookshelves and assembled the proverbial stack of Bibles on […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.