Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
I ordinarily have very little patience with the various species of brontosaurus who decry all the electronic suburbs of the Republic of Letters. I’ve worn out my ‘they’re entitled to their beliefs’ credit-balance when it comes to people who sniff at online-only publication – nowadays I just clamp my mouth shut instead of belligerently pointing [...]
Read MoreAn exuberant collection of essays and reviews by trailblazing natural historian Tim Flannery
Read MoreOur book today is The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton, a rollicking travel-adventure book that became a runaway bestseller when it appeared in 1925. It had been a gamble on his part, a gamble taken in the teeth of the odds and over the doubts of his friends and family – circumstances with [...]
Read More14th century court poet John Gower is brought in by his friend Geoffrey Chaucer to solve the mystery of a book whose very existence threatens the realm
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics win against tough competition, and one of my favorite of those is David Womersley’s wonderful one-volume abridgement of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This volume came out in 2000, hot on the heels of Womersley’s gigantic, utterly definitive three-volume unabridged edition of Gibbon’s masterpiece (the three fat paperback [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Anne Perry’s 1990 Victorian mystery, The Face of a Stranger, which introduced her detective William Monk to the thousands of her readers who’d previously enjoyed her ten novels set a generation later in Victorian times and starring Thomas Pitt – novels she’d been writing with clockwork regularity for ten years before [...]
Read MoreA seemingly random murder leads our hero Sebastian St. Cyr into the dark and dangerous world of international espionage in C. S. Harris's latest novel
Read MoreIn 1537, teenager Cosimo dei Medici became the first citizen of Florence, and in the following decades, he set about fashioning a 'sacral' rulership for himself - a complicated process at the heart of this fascinating new study
Read MoreOur book today is that hugely durable old 1910 war-horse, The Medici by G. F. Young, a quintessential example of the particular breed of monumental Victorian history that holds up effortlessly under the onslaught of time. It’s amazing, really, how widespread across the breadth of art and literature are these great histories – and it’s [...]
Read MoreIn her brilliantly scathing new book, Elaine Scarry charges that US Presidents, in maintaining and augmenting an enormous nuclear arsenal, have broken the social contract and become monarchs in all but name.
Read MoreA quick-witted and bilingual dwarf is planted in the household of England's foreign queen in order to spy on her - but he comes to esteem her, outcast to outcast
Read MoreAn exceptional beauty entices King Charles II and ascends to the heights of the Merry Monarch's court
Read MoreI let my subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction lapse for a bit, and I was amazed at how bleak the lapse rendered my reading landscape! I renewed as soon as I felt this, and today when I jammed my hand into that most bountiful of all orifices, the mighty Open Letters Monthly Post Office box, [...]
Read MoreIn an amazing science fiction debut, a New Yorker awakens in a strange new world
Read MoreCIA super-agent John Wells needs to get back in the field and feel the old adrenaline pumping again - but will his latest adventure (featuring a dastardly nuclear plot and a shadowy female operative with a Biblical code-name) be more than he bargained for?
Read MoreOur book today is The Crimson Patch, a 1936 murder mystery by the indomitable Phoebe Atwood Taylor, starring her recurrent character Asey Mayo and set, as all her fans know and love, on that sacred patch called Cape Cod. The Cape is a little hooked spit of land jutting out from the coast of [...]
Read MoreA key figure in the founding of the modern Middle East finally gets his definitive English-language biography
Read MoreThe Scarlet Letter? Moby-Dick? Gone with the Wind? Gravity's Rainbow? Just what IS the "Great American Novel" anyway?
Read MoreOur book today is a grim but charming little 1915 gem called A Hilltop on the Marne by Mildred Aldrich, an amplified collection of letters she wrote back to the United States after she moved to France and then specifically to Huiry, a little hamlet overlooking the Marne river. Aldrich had thought to “withdraw from [...]
Read MoreJonathan Rottenberg's new book contends that the modern world's epidemic of depression is made all the worse by society's tendency to stigmatize the victims themselves
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.