Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Just as the last embers are flickering out on the latest Open Letters Monthly Summer Reading feature, The Weekly Standard has trundled out one of its own, and in addition to items one suspects were selected for non-literary reasons (right-wing screed-histories and the like), there were some gems: Christoph Irmscher, who is himself the author [...]
Read MoreA popular science writer looks at the evidence for life on other planets
Read MoreOur book today is the 2006 DC Archive Edition featuring “The Shazam Family” but overwhelmingly devoted to the exploits of “The World’s Mightiest Boy,” Captain Marvel Junior. The character is – as you might guess – a spin-off of Fawcett Comics’ best-selling flagship super-hero, Captain Marvel, and this Archive Edition reprints his first ten appearances [...]
Read MoreThe latest events in the life of immortal, imperturbable Count Saint-Germain find him in Crusades-era Egypt
Read MoreRousing naval action and atmospheric period drama share the stage in S. Thomas Russell's latest novel, by any other name
Read MoreOur book today is a modern-day classic from 1987, The Norton Book of Travel Writing, edited for the ages by the great Paul Fussell and featuring a stellar roster of the greatest travel-writers of all time (with one incredibly glaring exception: there is no Mary Kingsley here). We have Freya Stark, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles [...]
Read MoreA bored cop in a beautiful French Mediterranean town is suddenly confronted with a genuine murder mystery in the middle of a typical tourist summer
Read MoreThe latest volume in the author's magnificent multi-volume biography covers the last years of Kafka's life - years marked by passionate affairs, political upheavals, and the shadow of his final illness
Read MoreNow in an attractive reprint from Princeton: the first volume in Reiner Stach's towering multi-volume biography of the 20th century's troubled literary godfather
Read MoreOur book today is Robert Harris’ drum-tight 2003 historical novel Pompeii, written in the formidable shadow not of Mount Vesuvius but of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 corker The Last Days of Pompeii. Bulwer-Lytton’s book has famously lodged in reading history as perhaps the single worst novel ever written (an unjust claim – the title clearly belongs [...]
Read MoreA short Kafka biography by a renowned historian makes some unconventional interpretations of the 20th century's most enigmatic writer
Read MoreThere's gunplay, there's skullduggery, there's the Federal Reserve, and there's the good old Freedom Trail - what more does a reader need on the arc from La Guardia to LAX?
Read MoreOur book today is 1867′s So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles by the great Archie Carr, the one-time professor of Zoology at the University of Florida who also wrote the classic natural history memoir The Windward Road (recently re-issued in a lovely paperback by the University Press of Florida – hint, [...]
Read MoreA self-absorbed young Brooklyn writer (what else?) goes from relationship to relationship in search of ... what, exactly?
Read MoreIn an entertaining new collection of good old stories, the boundary-line between Sam Spade and Mandrake the Magician is considerably blurred ...
Read MoreAfter an unearthly quiet of nearly three thousand years, he's been the idol of the world for nearly a century - he's the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, and Jo Marchant makes his old story new again
Read MoreA spirited new account of the divisive American presidential election race that was held amidst the growing clamor of European war
Read MoreOur book today is the fantastic 1998 novel An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis, a volume I’ve recommended and gifted countless times since it first appeared, even more times than its predecessor, Merlis’ stunning 1994 debut American Studies (and would be happy to gift again, should any of you want a copy), mainly for two [...]
Read MoreA monumental deck-clearing two-volume biography of Admiral Horatio Nelson reaches its thundering conclusion
Read MoreI thought my week’s Penny Press highlights had already passed, but the hits just keep coming! The New Yorker issue sporting the now-famous Bert & Ernie cover, for instance, features a great piece by Louis Menand called “The Color of Law,” about the systematic suppression of the black vote in the American South – an [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.