Comics: Thor - War of the Pantheons
/One of the first volumes of a new color reprint series from Marvel Comics features some high-flying adventures by the summer's superhero star, the mighty Thor!
Read MoreBook Review: Heir to the Empire City
/Fresh from chasing horse-thieves in wild Dakota territories, a rail-tough Theodore Roosevelt returned to New York City to face bandits of quite another sort - the Tammany Hall sort. A lean new history tells the great story.
Read MoreIt Was Fun, the Struggle
/The age of Roosevelt and Taft was also the age of Progressive reform - spearheaded by an amazing team of 'muckraking' writers the like of which the United States had never seen.
Read MoreListless Lists in the Penny Press!
/It’s beginning to be that time of year in the Penny Press, the infamous season of year-end book-lists. And since I’m the proud proprietor of the most authoritative of those lists (if I do say so myself)(and I do), I’m always irresistibly drawn to them wherever I find them – even if it’s in the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Musorgsky & His Circle
/Five remarkable men came together in 19th century St. Petersburg to challenge each other, compete with each other, inspire each other, and encourage each other - and some quite remarkable music resulted
Read MoreThe Norton Anthology of English Literature!
/Our book today is a masterpiece so ubiquitous it’s often completely overlooked: The Norton Anthology of English Literature–although as soon as I say that, I have to qualify it. Not qualify the ‘masterpiece’ part, of course (if I could be wrong about that part, I’d shutter Stevereads and start a beauty-tutorial channel on YouTube), but [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
/The near- infinite abundance of the Internet may seem incredibly alluring, but in his new book David Mikics argues that it's eating away at our ability to appreciate fully what we read. He offers rules and admonitions, as you might expect
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Selected Browning!
/Some Penguin Classics are, I bitterly concede, necessary compromises. Surely one such is the 1989 Selected Poems volume of Robert Browning, edited by Daniel Karlin, who rather optimistically writes in his Introduction that he “tried to strike a balance between the poems for which Browning is best known (but which are not always his best) [...]
Read MoreAuthor Interview: Jack Merridew
/The open frontier of self-publishing attracts a wide variety of pioneers - fiercely individual storytellers who for one reason or another have chosen a different path to realizing their writing dreams. One such pioneer is Jack Merridew, who at age 20 is already the author of two self-published works of fiction - and a successful YouTube creator as well. Open Letters talks with him about the brave new world of promoting your own dreams.
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Count of Monte Cristo!
/Some Penguin Classics look at first glance like a dream come true. Take the immense 1996 translation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo by Robin Buss: if you set it down next to, for example, the most popular paperback reprint of the book from twenty years ago, they hardly even look related: the [...]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Legends of the Ancient North!
/Some Penguin Classics try, with adorable flat-footedness, to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon in order to reach those ever-elusive unconverted readers. It’s an inherently silly thing for Penguin Classics to do, since theirs are the books that created the zeitgeist in the first place; in a perfect world, our reading culture would be attentively watching [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Stay
/It's an act of aggression in which the victim is the perpetrator, and it's a crime for which the criminal cannot be punished: it's suicide, and statistics show we're in the middle of an epidemic of it. A thoughtful new book lays out the case for sticking around.
Read MoreComics: Batman Year Zero!
/DC Comics’ “New 52” company-wide reboot hit some of their flagship characters harder than others. The venerable WWII-era Justice Society was retconned right out of existence; warm-hearted primary-color Superman became a brooding, disaffected Dr. Manhattan-in-a-cape; Captain Marvel lost his mind – when teenager Billy Batson says his magic word nowadays, all he gets is a [...]
Read MoreBook Review: American Statecraft
/American diplomats and Foreign Service workers travel for America, negotiate for America, cheerlead for America, and sometimes die for America - a magnificent new book gives them the sweeping historical account they've always deserved.
Read MoreBook Review: The Everything Store
/A new book by Brad Stone on Amazon.com: does it make nice with the online Goliath, or brandish a slingshot?
Read MoreCultural Amnesia!
/Our book today is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, a bristling, muscular, mazy haphazard cathedral of opinion erected by Clive James, that grinning ombudsman of the Republic of Letters. Cultural Amnesia takes its readers through an alphabet of ideas, and a look at the Table of Contents gives a great picture [...]
Read MoreThe Best of Gluyas Williams!
/Our book today is one of those gems that turn up regularly on the outdoor bargain-carts at my beloved Brattle Bookshop: it’s an old Dover paperback from 1971 called The Best of Gluyas Williams, with only a totally perfunctory Foreward by Charles Dana Gibson and a totally perfunctory Preface by Robert Benchley separating the reader [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Citizen Emperor
/A big new volume studies Napoleon Bonaparte from the peak of his power to the last days of his final exile
Read MoreBook Review: George Washington - Gentleman Warrior
/A born warrior striving to become a refined gentleman, or a refined gentleman striving to learn a warrior's ways? A new book looks at Washington the military commander
Read MoreNotes and Cribbage in the Penny Press!
/A satisfyingly literary core of The New Yorker this week, which is always pleasing and this time helped to compensate for certain lacks of satisfaction found elsewhere in the 11 November issue. It was great fun, for instance, to read Dan Chiasson’s nice long look at the poet Marianne Moore and to read his generally [...]
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