Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Some Penguin Classics are welcome back in new reprints as often as opportunity allows; indeed, the persistence of their reappearances gives us one of the signature comforts of a canon. These works keep getting reprinted, we’re reassured, because some works deserve to be reprinted regularly. We can certainly think of the new Penguin Classics edition […]
Read MoreThe bestselling author of the "Kingkiller Chronicles" turns in a short novella devoted to one of his fan-favorite characters
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are amazing original productions, which is an odd thing to say about the world’s best line of reprints. A perfect example – and a timely one, considering the Halloween/Samhain double-whammy that strikes most of the West today – is the new Penguin Book of Witches, a fantastic original anthology of key original […]
Read MoreA punchy and intensely readable new biography of America's greatest playwright
Read MoreJust in time for the November midterm elections, we do what doubters said couldn't be done: we present you with a list of ten great political books that doesn't include Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.
Read MoreVeteran historian Brookhiser takes a look at the formative influences on Abraham Lincoln - not so much his own father as the Founding Fathers.
Read MoreVeteran popularizer Peter Ackroyd gives his readers a rattling good yarn of kings, decapitations, interregnums, frivolities, and depositions
Read MoreThe boyish hero of the American Revolution who became a more problematic and complicated figure in the political upheavals of his native France, the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette gets a sparkling new biography
Read MoreHe ruled an empire on which, it was famously said, the sun never set - and he did all the paperwork himself! It's a new life of King Philip II of Spain
Read MoreOur book today is Thorton Wilder’s wonderful 1948 epistolary Roman historical novel The Ides of March; I found a neat old green-jacketed cover at the Brattle Bookshop the other day, and I smiled all the more readily at the sight of it, since I’d recently been unutterably wearied by the hosannas showered by the book-chat […]
Read MoreThe mighty Maid who led medieval France's armies to a string of improbable victories before being burned at the stake for witchcraft has been immortalized in song, on stage, on film - and in countless books. A new biography is the latest to tell the tale.
Read MoreOur book today is Henry David Thoreau’s beloved posthumous 1865 book Cape Cod, a collection of pieces he wrote for the Penny Press detailing trips he and a companion made to Cape Cod in 1849, 1850, and 1853. They tramped everywhere, in all weathers, and Thoreau’s razor-sharp observational powers caught every nuance of the local […]
Read MoreBiographer Kirstin Downey frees Queen Isabella from the shadow of her husband Ferdinand and sets her center-stage in her own incredible life
Read MoreIn colonial America, a strange, otherworldly English preacher set off a tidal wave of fundamentalist revivalism that shaped an entire generation.
Read MoreTwenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall came down and the structure of European politics changed literally overnight. A fantastic new book dissects a turning point in modern history
Read MoreWilbur Smith continues the adventures of his super-eunuch Taita in his latest novel set in ancient Egypt
Read MoreEverybody knows Procopius as the author of the scandalous "Secret History" - but he wrote a long and fascinating work of straightforward history as well, and that work finally gets a great one-volume English edition.
Read More3000 years ago, a capable, enigmatic woman named Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for over twenty years; a spirited new biography tells her story
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted, become curious little gems in their own right, regardless of the advance of scholarship or textual history, and one of those is the 1957 translation of La Chanson de Roland done by renowned mystery novel author Dorothy Sayers. The Song of Roland, that massively popular medieval verse epic about […]
Read MoreIn postwar Washington, a group of smart, well-placed and high-powered friends helped to set national policy over after-dinner conversation - a sparkling new book tells their story
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.