Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is a good oldie reprinted for crass opportunistic motives: it’s the latest “Epic Collection” from Marvel Comics, The Avengers: Behold … The Vision, and the crass part isn’t far to seek: the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron is still in theaters worldwide and has already grossed north of $500 million with no […]
Read MoreFor my final romance round-up in May, I slouched back to my admitted favorite sub-genre, the Regency – and not your grandmother’s Regency (your grandmother, that is, not mine – there’s no documentary evidence that my dear Granny ever read a book in her incredibly long life, bless the dear) but this new richer and […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have been reprinted so many times in so many formats and years and fads that no further possible textual justification can ever be found for doing it again – instead, publishers have to think outside the book, have to look for nuances of presentation if they want to create something that feels […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics mark a melancholy succession, and works in translation are particularly vulnerable to this. The old cherished translations of great works – the Rosemary Edmonds War and Peace, the E. V. Rieu Homer, the Dorothy Sayers Divine Comedy, and so on – begin to feel almost imperceptibly dated around the edges. If they’re […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are legitimate scholarly landmarks. Not as many as you might expect, and for the clear reason that the overriding purpose of any classics-reprint line is actually the opposite of originality: a new Introduction here, a pretty new cover there, but the heart of Dover, Signet, Bantam, Penguin and all other reprint lines […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics maintain a gruesome kind of relevance, which is surely part of what’s behind the publisher’s decision to bring Jean Larteguy’s 1960 French bestseller Les Centurions back into print, here ushering the book into the Classics line with the Xan Fielding translation (as The Centurions) and a Foreward by Balkan Ghosts author Robert […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics look so darn elegant in their special anniversary editions, which certainly applies to the 50th anniversary reprint of The River Between, the lean and powerful 1965 debut novel by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, here presented with a new Introduction by Beasts of No Nation author Uzodinma Iweala and sporting a gorgeous […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have perfect timing, and this neat new reprint of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s beloved 1922 bestseller The Enchanted April is a great example. If it had actually reached me in the month of April here in Boston, with the skies still black, the days still freezing, and the streets and parks still piled […]
Read MoreOur book today is actually a re-read, though you’d never guess to look at it! Just recently at a library book sale (about which more soon) I came across a paperback called Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls by R. S. Downie. The author’s name sounded vaguely familiar (as familiar as it possibly could to […]
Read MoreOur books today take the standard elements of romance novels – the he, the she, the chemistry, the complications, etc. – and add in just about the last ingredient you’d think any romance novel would need: the supernatural. I realize that supernatural romance is still (and possibly forever?) all the rage, but it’s always seemed […]
Read MoreAny given issue of the mighty TLS will be an intellectual and even emotional journey, and the 1 May issue was no exception. The showpiece of the issue was the great conductor Leon Botstein reviewing two new books about the composer Franz Schubert, one of which was Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey, so ably reviewed […]
Read MoreOur book today goes by the quintessential Steve-book name of The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday, an utterly delightful 1920 “diplomatic memoir” by Lord Frederic Hamilton, a minor younger son of the Duke of Abercorn who could expect little in the way of any inheritance and so entered the British diplomatic corps and duly shuttled around […]
Read MoreOur book today is Stone Cold Dead, the third book in James Ziskin’s enormously enjoyable series (from the good folks at Seventh Street Books) chronicling the adventures of Ellie Stone, 25-year-old “girl reporter” for the Republic, the local newspaper for the little town of New Holland in upstate New York in the 1960s. Ellie is […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics celebrate awkward anniversaries, and in the literary world, it looks like no anniversary this side of the publication of Mein Kampf will ever be more awkward than that of Rudyard Kipling, born 150 years ago, whose incredible body of work has been simplified and then vilified under the “Empire jingo” tag for […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are just eye-openingly beautiful, extravagantly so in the case of the recent hardcover Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the first English translation of a medieval Arabic work called the Hikayat, the manuscript of which was found by a German Arabic scholar in a library in Istanbul and published […]
Read MoreThere was never any real doubt that I would return to The New Republic even in what Penny Press historians will refer to as the Post-Chotiner Period. After all, the magazine still has an ample Books section, and even though that section is now run by a couple of guys who did themselves no PR […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics break with tradition, almost always to excellent effect. Of course the foremost tradition we all associate with Penguin Classics is the durable, curiously dignified paperback reprints that have been the backbone of the publishing house for well over half a century, and Penguin still produces those in abundance, the finest reprint line […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted here at Stevereads a few times in the past, take on a life of their own as translations even when the larger currents of social understanding and the craft of translation have moved on. I was reminded of this just the other day when I encountered a slightly battered […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Doll Maker by Richard Montanari (from Mulholland Books), that author’s eight installment in his series of police procedurals set among the mean streets of present-day Philadelphia and starring grizzled police detective Kevin Byrne and his younger, smarter partner Jessica Balzano. This latest adventure opens in a typically gripping fashion, with […]
Read MoreOur book today is Pleasure by the Busload, a brimmingly delightful work of travel-writing done by Emily Kimbrough in 1961, with whimsical line-drawings by Mircea Vasilu. Kimbrough was famous at the time as one-half of the writing team (along with Cornelia Otis Skinner) of the best-selling 1942 book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, and […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.