Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is The Laughing Policeman, a 1968 police procedural mystery from the phenomenally popular Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo that got translated into English in 1970 and quickly racked up more critical and popular success than all the authors’ previous novels combined and is still considered something [...]
Read MoreSherlock Holmes's legendary nemesis Professor Moriarty returns - as super-sleuth hero of a new thriller involving a threat to Queen Victoria's throne and the nation itself
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics claim only the flimsiest of excuses for their existence, and one such recent example would have to be the new reprint of Landscape with Figures, the selected prose writings of the great Victorian author and nature-writer Richard Jefferies, who was born in 1848 and died in 1887 and yet managed to cram [...]
Read MoreIn chaos-plagued Beirut, a voracious reader lives an oddly fulfilling secret life
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Read MoreKafka's immortal story about a man who wakes up one day and finds he's an insect gets a sterling new translation
Read MoreThe engrossing first volume of a very promising new fantasy series
Read MoreA retired small-town music professor becomes an unlikely fugitive from the law in Richard Powers' latest novel
Read MoreWhen an ordinary man pulls an arrow from the wing of a crane, extraordinary things begin to happen in the new novel by Patrick Ness
Read MoreDon't be fooled by the "Rebecca" echoes - there's a lot more to Rachel Pastan's "Alena" than mere Manderley-redux
Read MoreOur book today is just about as fine an example of an intelligent, readable popular biography as can be produced in our imperfect world: Christopher Herold’s 1958 National Book Award-winning life of Madame de Stael, Mistress to An Age, which both sold like hotcakes when it first appeared but also satisfied most of the critics; [...]
Read MoreOne of the brightest stars in the sci-fi/fantasy night sky writes about the interesting stuff she's been re-reading
Read MoreOur book today is that fat tome from 2011, Arguably, a big bright collection of the deadline pieces and miscellaneous hackwork of the late Christopher Hitchens, who actually passed the most feared of authorial meridians and became late in the hanging interval between the book’s appearances in hardcover and its re-issue in paperback (it’s maybe [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Sejanus, a 1998 corker by a writer we’ll be meeting again in this Mystery Monday cavalcade: English mystery author David Wishart, whose whodunits are set in ancient Rome and star leisured, inquisitive, and smart-mouthed Marcus Corvinus and his equally-inquisitive wife Perilla. The books sport titles like Ovid, Nero, and Germanicus, so [...]
Read MoreNow in paperback, the latest adventure of William Shakespeare's crime-sleuthing, spy-hunting brother John!
Read MoreIf you're expecting Heloise to make an appearance in this captivating work of scholarship, you'll be disappointed - but not for long, since scholar John Marendbon manages quite well without her
Read MoreA fiery German princess in disguise is hiding in London from the threat of an assassin - but her subterfuge throws her right into the arms of the most handsome man she's ever seen (who has dark secrets of his own, naturally, this being a romance novel and all!)
Read MoreOrdinarily, the confluence of deadline pressure, space limitations, and professional responsibility tend to level the discourse in the mainstream Penny Press – at least, the regions of it where I forage. It’s true that the front half of explicitly political magazines like The New Statesman or The Weekly Standard will be full of articles claiming [...]
Read MoreA new collection of old short stories from the writer of "The Flame Alphabet"
Read MoreOur book today is The Court of St. James’s, a marvelous 1959 confection by that indefatigable hack E. S. Turner, who found rather early on in his life that few pleasures in this world are so reliable and so joyous as the pleasure of making words on the page do exactly what you want them [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.