Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
It was a decidedly non-literary day at Ye Olde PO Box: no Arion, no TLS, no London Review of Books, no New York Review of Books … not even the New York Times Book Review to further the ongoing necessary inquiry. Instead, almost as a warning of the lower elevations head, there was a new issue [...]
Read MoreOur book today is E. Phillips Oppenheim’s 1910 thriller, The Illustrious Prince, which opens right away, on Page 1, with an inadvertent thrill delivered right over the heads of its contemporary readers and right to the reading cortex of its 21st Century audience. In the opening scene, a luxury liner has missed its evening tide [...]
Read MoreThe great travel-adventure classic gets a pretty new reprint
Read MoreThe newest novel from the newest Chilean literary wunderkind
Read MoreA new history of the Second World War focuses on the mid-level thinkers and technicians whose innovations made the grand strategies work
Read More"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreJosiah for President by Martha Bolton Zondervan, 2012 “If you can’t trust the Amish, who can you trust?” asks a gushing voter in Martha Bolton’s debut novel, Josiah for President, and like jesting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. Bolton may be a first-time novelist, but she’s an old hand at writing, with over [...]
Read MoreIn Michael Dahlie's new novel, an idle young millionaire ghost-writes a book for an arrogant Hollywood star
Read MoreMy usual one-two combination of The London Review of Books and the TLS always has a huge amount of long, meaty, scholarly piece of literary journalism – that’s why I’ve been coming back to them every week since before most of you were born. And this last week was no exception, with plenty of great, [...]
Read MoreShe's a master thief who wants to rob the world's richest man; he's a master assassin who wants to kill the world's richest man - what happens when they run headlong into each other in a glass-and-steel death-trap?
Read MoreA new history of World War I looks at twelve fragile moments, twelve turning points when small factors determined very large outcomes
Read MoreEarth's frozen, forbidding continent is the subject of Gabrielle Walker's latest book
Read MoreThe death of a talented teenage artist spins his family and friends into turmoil in Manu Joseph's incredibly accomplished second novel.
Read MoreIn the latest Ismail Kadare novel to be translated into English, an Albanian doctor invites the invading Nazis to an elaborate dinner at his house - but what exactly happens that night, to the strains of Schubert?
Read MoreUntil comparatively recently, historically speaking, mankind existed in small hunter-gatherer societies without states or agriculture. Best-selling author Jared Diamond's latest book examines the possible up-side of those primitive edens.
Read MoreAs usual, the latest National Geographic contained wonders – and as usual, many of those wonders were distinctly familiar to me! That’s one of the best things about the magazine, for those of its readers who’ve seen a bit of the world: the best photographers in the business work every month to bring it all [...]
Read MoreSince there’s bloody little else to do on these wretched state and federal holidays during which the holy Post Office is closed (and with a winter storm coming – that being something of a tradition for Inauguration Days I care about), we can get a lot of extra reading done on Martin Luther King Day. [...]
Read MoreDC Comics collects the 1980s adventures of the Man of Steel, as drawn by the legendary Gil Kane!
Read MoreA generous anthology collects the work of one of the greatest travel-writers of our day
Read MoreMarvel's X-Men reprint series reaches some epoch-defining issues
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.