Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is that megalith of all comic book graphic novels, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which ran as a four-issue mini-series in 1986 and was collected into a single volume shortly thereafter. I recently re-read it on the occasion of giving it as a gift to a friend who’ll never read it [...]
Read MoreAlthough it’s a typically fraught comics week (new X-Men mania! a new team of Avengers!), the brightest nugget is pure gold: Mike Mignola returning to write and draw a mini-series starring his great creation, Hellboy. The series is called “Hellboy in Hell,” and its first issue kicks off this week with a synopsis page guaranteed [...]
Read MorePerfect for the dog-lover on your gift list: a great big new dog-themed anthology from the vaults of the New Yorker
Read MoreSome of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read MoreOpen Letters Weekly has been the venue for hundreds of book reviews in 2012. For your reading pleasure and holiday book-buying convenience, we gather them here in chronological order.
Read MoreFranz Kafka was eternally affianced but never married - maybe more in love with the concept of love than with any particular woman. A new novel intensely dramatizes the writer and his passions.
Read More“There are certain days,” an old friend once said with soft-spoken certainty, “when quite simply nothing else will do but a spot of murder.” This has been one of those days. A bright, seasonable, obligation-free day calls for slow, hours-long treks with the dogs through forest stands and up along windswept hilltops, with red-tailed hawks [...]
Read MoreTrying to mind his own business, a man at a Yankees game refuses to stand for a singing of "God Bless America" - and all Hell breaks loose.
Read MoreThe many natural worlds of India - and the variety of striking animals who inhabit those worlds - come alive in this enormous illustrated volume
Read MoreThe latest volume of travel-writing from novelist and memoirist Andre Aciman takes readers from Paris to Rome to Venice to New York and back
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics front such a great story that you feel irresistibly compelled to open with it: a rector of stern and upright countenance mounts the lectern of the old church of Diss in Norfolk, his broad, rough face blackened with barely suppressed rage. He has lately come from a dressing-down given to him by [...]
Read MoreFresh from the halcyon 1980s, the avenging murderer of mass murderers gets a fresh new reprint series
Read MoreDramatized in the pages of this brilliant book, the Nazi state's embracing of accelerated war-production set a dark pattern for the entire world
Read MoreThe Hostest with the Mostes' tells her life story in (mostly, kind of) her own words!
Read MoreLogically, the very idea of boxed sets of books should be off-putting to any serious reader. Boxed sets are constricted affairs, after all, hemmed in on five sides, when books themselves are famously near-fluid things, not only physically (I’ve had them fit into virtually any shape, often unpredictable ones brought on by shameful neglect) but [...]
Read MoreThe calm-eyed gold-plated absolute rulers of ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs in all their splendor, are brought to life in a revealing new history.
Read MoreEdgar Rice Burroughs' legendary Ape Man gets a comprehensive visual tribute fit for the king of the jungle
Read MoreThe vast tapestry of Persian literary history gets a new - and decidedly problematic - overview from one of the subject's greatest modern scholars
Read MoreDC Comics' fan-favorite super-team gets a definitive re-telling of its origin story - or at least provisionally definitive.
Read MoreThe warrior-clones in Steven Kent's Clone Republic series can handle just about anything on the battlefield - but what if somebody starts tinkering with their programming?
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.