Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Any batch of new romance novels will certainly feature a few whose narratives are grounded not on people but on places. Their covers feature landscapes and promise to be “A [Location X] Novel,” and a newcomer to the phenomenon might wonder at the appeal. When we look at three of them chosen at random, that […]
Read MoreHow could I not make mention of the fact that Esquire, one of my most steadfast glossy lad-mags, hits its 1000th issue this month? To put it mildly, it’s not every magazine that reaches one thousand issues – hell, there aren’t many writing endeavors of any kind that reach such a milestone (blushing modesty prevents […]
Read MoreOur book today is On the Vineyard, a 1980 collection of short essays and reflections about Martha’s Vineyard, accompanied by stunning black-and-white photos by Peter Simon, and the impulse that drove me to take it down from my shelf is akin to the impulse that always makes me think of Cape Cod at summer’s end. […]
Read MoreOur book today is Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal The Hound of the Baskervilles,which brought back, in 1901, the beloved character of Sherlock Holmes who’d been killed off nearly a decade earlier by an author who was both bored by his formulaic stories and jealous of his international fame. The events of The Hound of the […]
Read MoreOur book today is a big fat thing called Akhenaten: King of Egypt by Cyril Aldred (when reading pretty much any history on pretty much any subject, you should, if possible, hold out for a historian named Cyril Aldred), and in addition to being a fantastic soup-to-nuts historical and archaeological account of ancient Egypt’s infamous […]
Read MoreOur book today is Shakespeare, which Anthony Burgess wrote one morning in 1970 after a 40-pint evening. The morning was raw and scratchy, one imagines, and our author, not at his best, needed some task to distract him before his four-course breakfast and pick-me-up whiskey was ready. The afternoon was already planned: a TV show […]
Read MoreOur book today is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – and only Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, here presented in a hefty green-jacketed 1931 hardcover from the old Aventine Press, whose editors decided to present the author’s 1892 edition of his great work entirely without critical apparatus of any kind. I found this Aventine volume […]
Read MoreOur book today is Twelve Days of Terror, Richard Fernicola’s 2001 history of the famous series of shark attacks that happened at the Jersey Shore in 1916, when four people were killed in July by a shark – probably a single shark, probably a bull shark, since it was able to travel up-river quite a […]
Read MoreBoth the big superhero comic book companies, Marvel and DC, are currently in continuity turmoil that would be shocking if it weren’t so crucially boring. And it makes the weekly trip to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston a bit of a trial. Gone beyond reclamation – almost beyond recall – are the days when […]
Read MoreThe latest issue of Harper’s very much wanted me to pay most of my attention to William Deresiewicz’s cover essay on how colleges and universities these days have been co-opted by a “neo-liberal” agenda that infests institutions of higher learning – and how the students themselves have also been co-opted by this agenda, now […]
Read MoreOur book today is My Own Cape Cod, which Gladys Taber wrote in 1971 about her many idyllic seasons at Still Cove, her house on Mill Pond at Orleans on Cape Cod. We’ve met Taber already here at Stevereads as the once-popular author of the Stillmeadow books (hence the name of her cove), and in […]
Read MoreOur book today is The White Ghost, the latest historical mystery by James R. Benn starring Bostonian ex-detective and now WWII Lieutenant Billy Boyle. In this tenth Billy Boyle adventure (each one of which easily stands alone for new readers), Boyle and his friend Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz, an expatriate Polish count who functions as […]
Read MoreOur book today, Felicity Wigan’s oversized 1987 treat The English Dog at Home (with beautiful photographs by Geoffrey Shakerley) might more accurately have been titled The English Dog at the Stately Home, since the dogs in question aren’t exactly the spavined little mutts owned by every Darby and Joan in the tenements of Leeds. No, […]
Read MoreOn newsstands now, as the saying goes, is one of my very favorite semi-regular Penny Press confections: a New Yorker cartoon collection. This one is meant to commemorate the magazine’s 90th anniversary (as unbelievable as that figure must seem to some of us), and (equally unbelievable, in its own way) this seems to be the […]
Read MoreOur book today is Sir Edward Creasy’s durable 1851 classic work of popular military history, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a worthy work that no 21st-century reader can approach without feeling just about the saddest irony in the world. Creasy, surveying the sunny morning of his Victorian era, with Napoleon Bonaparte long since […]
Read MoreAfter a solid week of Penguin Classics, what better palate-cleanser could there be than a sojourn through the Fall Fashion issues of the glossy magazines? It’s a way to run a quick finger down the ‘content’-xylophone from the deeper notes of Longfellow and Dostoevsky to, well, to the very, very strange world of fashion. Almost […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we noted last time, come along as almost indisputable improvements on what’s come before (‘almost’ because there’ll always be a few token refusniks in any crowd, don’t you know), and in the case of the last item in our Week of Penguins, the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are clear, almost necessary improvements on their own Penguin predecessors, and we’ll be closing out our week of Penguins with two of those – starting with a new collection of the writings of Gertrude Bell called, somewhat redundantly, A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert. The volume […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have horrible tidings to convey. In the broader game of literature, there’s no real way around that. On paper, all books are like the spirits in the underworld encountered by Ulysses: they need human blood in order to give them the power to speak. Printed words never stole a man’s property or […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen over the years, abruptly thrust their readers into bewilderingly alien territory. For every well-known novel by a Bronte sister, in these thrillingly multi-cultural days, Penguin’s editors will cast their eyes to Africa or China, and the result is a growing library of diverse texts to keep readers very profitably […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.