Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Some Penguin Classics, as we mentioned last time, are lost causes right out of the starting gate, and if such a thing applies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, how much more does it apply to this wonderful 1988 Penguin volume edited by Lawrence Buell, who wrote last 2014’s fantastic book The Dream of the […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics preach a doomed gospel to the masses, and one of them that does this most self-consciously is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh, here presented in the lovely 1995 black-spine Classic edited by John Robert Glorney Bolton and his daughter Julia Bolton Holloway with a picture on the cover of a […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics frankly puzzle, and a perfect example of this not-always-frustrating sub-category would have to be the plump new Complete Poetry volume of George Herbert, edited by Victoria Moul and John Drury, which comes only a skimpy ten years after the last edition of the previous Penguin Complete Herbert, edited by John Tobin, then […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics seem particularly to invite the Deluxe treatment, and for a host of reasons good and bad, the poetry of Robert Frost is certainly one of those. This lovely little Deluxe Classic is set to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frost’s iconic and poster-friendly poem “The Road Not Taken,” and […]
Read MoreOur book today is an old favorite: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, here in the durable John Addington Symonds translation from 1887. Cellini started dictating the book in 1558 when he was 58 and clearly warmed to the novel task as he got going, and that feeling of making-it-up-as-he-goes-along momentum sends a current of electricity […]
Read MoreAmong yesterday’s comics was a “Secret Wars” spin-off set in the world Marvel Comics readers first saw in 2006-07’s “Civil War” mini-series, with artwork by Leinil Francis Yu and very solid writing by Charles Soule, the first two issues made for some snappy comics – just like most of the original “Civil War” stories did, […]
Read MoreOur book today a neat little 1946 banquet of travel-writing, When the Going Was Good, by Evelyn Waugh, that pomaded prince of the Seasoned Pro class of travel-writers. The book is a crushed compilation of four earlier works: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and – Waugh stressed the title wasn’t of his choosing – Waugh […]
Read MoreOur book today is Robert Tewdwr Moss’s 1997 cult classic, Cleopatra’s Wedding Present: Travels through Syria, a strange and often lovely volume that’s also inescapably sad, since right after completing a final draft of the book, the author was left bound and gagged by robbers in his London apartment and suffocated before he could be […]
Read MoreOur book today is Peregrine Hodson’s Under a Sickle Moon, his 1986 account of the 1984 trek he made through over a thousand miles of Afghanistan, and the book is a perfect little reminder of the three kinds of travelogue-writers: The Whining Interloper, The Seasoned Pro, and The Professional Alien. If the name “Peregrine Hodson” […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Book of Dogs, a lovely leatherbound thing put out by the National Geographic Society back in 1919, subtitled “An Intimate Study of Mankind’s Best Friend.” The text is by Ernest Harold Baynes, with plenty of black-and-white photographs supplementing color illustrations by Louise Agassiz Fuertes and Hashime Murayama, and although semi-official […]
Read MoreOur book today is Patricia O’Toole’s wonderful 1990 biography of a set, The Five of Hearts, subtitled “An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918.” The five in question are Adams himself, his wife Clover, John Hay and his wife Clara, and Clarence King, an effusive and flamboyant “entrepreneur” who shines just a […]
Read MoreOur book today is John Rowland’s warm and wonderful 1947 classic Cache Lake Country, ostensibly about the author’s small rough-living getaway cabin deep in the vast Ontario North Woods, although as Rowland makes clear at the outset, the quiet and sheer beauty of the place almost abstracts the place from any map or guidebook: On […]
Read MoreWhen it comes to genre fiction, could there be any words more encouraging than “First in a New Series”? Mysteries, sci-fi, and especially fantasy and romance tend to favor books-in-series to an absolutely exorbitant extent, to the point where by the time you happen to run across a series that might want to read, you […]
Read MoreAs I’ve noted on many occasions, book-reviewing can be tricky business for people who aren’t me. Most reviewers have actual personal lives, for instance, and I’ve heard that those can take up time and effort, entail trips to Ikea, and sometimes lead the unwary into the wilds of Canada. Most reviewers likewise devote ungawdly number […]
Read MoreThe Penny Press this week featured a long article on a remorseless natural disaster, something that strikes without warning, wantonly destroys property, and inflicts untold pain and misery on humans around the world. I refer, of course, to corgis. Specifically, to a wonderfully wonky article in the latest Vanity Fair by Michael Joseph Gross about […]
Read MoreThe always-delightful “Summer Reading” issue of The Weekly Standard came out recently (with its typically witty cover, only this one, unlike all the earlier classics of its kind, worries that its central joke will be missed by the general readership – so the punch line, “The Turn of the Screw,” is actually spelled out, just […]
Read MoreOur book today is an amplified edition of Obiter Dicta, which English politician Augustine Birrell first published in 1885 but had occasion to re-issue a couple of times between 1885 and 1890. The book is a collection of some of the literary pieces Birrell was always working on while also serving in various governments at […]
Read MoreI’m one of many periodical readers, I suspect, who read Usman Malik’s superb mini-essay “Rockets, Robots, and Reckless Imagination” in The Herald magazine out of Pakistan; the piece has been linked and shared liberally since it appeared a couple of days ago, and deservedly so. In a little over 2000 words, Malik manages to write […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have perfect timing. Not many, as you’d expect, since the line deals primarily in works of literature that are specifically timeless – but in some cases, the when can mean a lot even alongside the what, and today is one of those case: a pretty new Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s […]
Read MoreOur book today is Old Friends, a 1909 collection of typically syrupy reminiscences put down on paper by the then-legendary drama critic and theater historian William Winter, who immediately sets about answering the charge of a Boston book-critic that he was a “mere maunder, sodden with lazy idolatry for days gone by.” “Let not those […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.