Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is The Queen’s Head, a 1988 murder mystery set in the England of Elizabeth I, written by a first-class hack under the pen-name of “Edward Marston” (there’s an in-joke there, but you’d have to be mighty well-read to spot it, and there’s no class of scribblers better-read, of course, than hacks). The […]
Read MoreKing Henry VIII's last wife referred to her as "Hell," and the Court universally despised her coarse ambition - she was Anne Seymour, and she's the unlikely subject of a nifty new novel
Read MoreEven a winter-fancying polar bear (or perhaps arctic fox? I’ve had my nose licked by the latter and only been silently, systematically terrorized by the former, so maybe we’ll go with “arctic fox”) such as myself could hardly have complained about the gorgeous summer day that unfurled today in observance of the Boston Public Library’s […]
Read More1856 London rang from one end to the other with the celebrated murder trial of Dr. William Palmer. A delightful new history presents the story for a new generation
Read MoreMy favorites at over at BookTube continue to do their book-challenges and their book-unboxings and their book-hauls, so I thought I’d post my own first book-haul of June 2014! Not my first book-haul of the month just across the board, mind you; in my unofficial capacity as postal-gopher for Open Letters Monthly, I’m in the […]
Read MoreAs usual, the “Summer Fiction” issue of the New Yorker had its fair share of good things. In years past with these issues, I’ve often had to look elsewhere than the actual fiction to find those good things, but in 2014 the magazine has been on the run of its life for short stories, and […]
Read MoreOur book today is Homer’s Iliad, a choice some of you will have been expecting all throughout this “summer books” thread, since I’ve made no secret of the fact that I re-read Homer every year, the Iliad in June and the Odyssey in August. I use them as mental bookends to what we’ll increasingly need […]
Read MoreFor hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived and thrived and worshipped in what is now the British Isles, raising massive monuments and scorching the very ground in the long ages before the arrival of Christianity; a magisterial new history recounts as much as we now know about those lost centuries
Read MoreOur books today form an essential part of “summer” reading: trash. I mentioned yesterday the peculiar mongrel enjoyability of a crappy book, but I mentioned it in context of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, which is thickly populated with very brainy authors, most of whom, when sober, would sternly disavow the idea that they ever intentionally wrote […]
Read MoreOur books today are yet another steady go-to choice for “summer books”: science fiction and fantasy novels, most of which I tend to read during the lazier summer months. Is there any point in concealing the fact that this is because the books themselves are often lazier? Most of them – even the best of […]
Read MoreOur books today might seem like strange candidates for the category of “summer books,” since we naturally equate all things Sherlock Holmes with fog-bound London rather than sun-brightened Boston, but as I mentioned yesterday, an equally-important element of summer books is their feeling of ease, of being a home rather than a journey. I think […]
Read MoreOur books today speak and breathe of summer, because June traditionally ushers in the long march of summer in Boston. The days are longer, and usually, at least in June, the evenings slowly glide into fragrant, cool relief from the day’s heat, and something ineluctable changes just a bit in the mental atmosphere. Though I’ve […]
Read MoreWhen one comics legend stepped down from the "Tarzan" newspaper comic strip nearly a century ago, another comics legend - Burne Hogarth - took over, and "Tarzan in the City of Gold" is Titan Books' first lavish reprint of Hogarth's run on the title
Read MoreThomas Piketty's great mountain of Gallic macro-economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was the hit of the Western world for one heady season. Then the parade moved on, and we were left, dazed and disheveled, wondering if we've been fed un truc de ouf. Our Peer Review attempts to sort out the l'affaire Piketty
Read MoreThe hands-down winner for Most Obnoxious Opening Paragraph for a Book Review This Week goes to New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball, reviewing Christopher Buckley’s new essay collection But Enough About You in the National Review: I’d known for years that Christopher Buckley was an amusing man. His novel Thank You for Smoking (1994), […]
Read MoreA stunning portrait of a people driven by fear and then consumed by hate
Read MoreA modern classic - now in an English-language translation - examines the roots of prewar German anti-Semitism
Read MoreRemembering stories about the Holocaust shades into inventing stories about the Holocaust in Boris Fishman's fantastic debut
Read MoreA mother in Colorado, grieving for her young son, confronts the fact that he might have been leading a life she never imagined
Read MoreA reclusive young woman meets a high-spirited blind girl whose enthusiasm for life opens a new world
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.