Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
As I’ve mentioned in previous years, the health of the debut fiction field is often an excellent gauge of the health of the whole book-scene (the vigor and inventiveness of reprints being another). Hardcover books are, after all, obscenely expensive, and a first-time author is a chance, a speculation – not something an increasingly timid […]
Read MoreThe arithmetic that governs centennial celebrations in the Republic of Letters is schoolishly simple: you start with one (1) bromide, you multiply it by ten (10) factoids gleaned from Wikipedia, you increase that total by the number of readers who are likely to know anything at all about your subject (Arabic civilization gave us the […]
Read MoreThe roll call of periodicals I read was grimly undiminished in 2014. The list – currently National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Men’s Journal, Outside, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Publisher’s Weekly, Harper’s, The Rolling Stone, […]
Read MoreIn 1871, thousands of aggrieved Parisians banded together to create an independent socialist community lodged inside their home city, and it functioned as a living dream - until it was brutally destroyed. A new book tells the story of the Paris Commune.
Read MoreLaying out the ground rules for a new category like “Best Guilty Pleasures” almost necessitates defining such a thing as “guilty pleasures” just in general, I realize, and that’s always trickier than it seems, especially if you’re trying to avoid a lazy fall-back like Justice Potter Stewart’s offhand definition of pornography, I know it when […]
Read MoreThe book-snobs among you – and you know who you are – will no doubt raise an eyebrow at the fact that “Best Romance” is a separate category from “Guilty Pleasures.” “Surely,” such book-snobs will sniff, “all romance novels are guilty pleasures? Surely a genre with no pretensions to literary quality can’t be anything but […]
Read MoreThe danger of nature-writing in 2014 is glaringly obvious: nature itself is in full retreat on most parts of the planet. Species are going extinct at a rate unseen in millions of years; environments are being destroyed so quickly that the deterioration can be measured year by year and sometimes month by month; animal species […]
Read MoreIn a trend that’s continued for three years now, I read more new books this year than in any previous year of my life, a very drastic change from the many years when I read virtually no new books at all, and a big enough change even from as recent as ten years ago, when […]
Read MoreDecember begins here in Boston as all other months now do, with bright sunlight, shirtsleeve weather, and not the smallest hint of wind or moisture – like Tempe, only with a Dunkin’ Donuts every 500 feet. But December of course has one distinctive feature: it signals the end of another year, the swift winding-down of […]
Read MoreAn older Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise-A voyage to the edge of the Federation to help two warring planets make peace - and there they encounter a long-lost figure from their past
Read MoreHugely talented biographer Andrew Roberts has written a big biography of Napoleon Bonaparte - but when it comes to such a well-known figure, are readers in danger of fatigue de bataille?
Read MoreA pretty new anthology dips into the vast Chinese poetic tradition
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics become immediately indispensable. They so firmly supplant all previous editions of their particular work that those previous editions become curiosities, interesting in only ancillary ways. A notable recent example of this would be the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of the Heike, and now the Penguin imprint clearly has another: a […]
Read MoreThe Resurrection of the Dead We are buried below with everything we did, with our tears and our laughs. We have made storerooms of history out of it all, galleries of the past, and treasure houses, buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble in the cellars of time. We will […]
Read MoreA revelatory new book explores the uneasy dealings the Third Reich had with the thousands of Muslims who suddenly found themselves under Nazi rule
Read MoreA fiery new history seeks to reclaim the lost honor of both Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
Read MoreWhen the chaos of the First World War swept over the Middle East, it disrupted patterns of life that had been steady for centuries - and left conflicts that roil still today
Read MoreFor eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was […]
Read MoreShe's convinced they're married; he's adamant they're not. Let the Regency games begin!
Read MoreWhat an unruly, monstrous house cat hath joined together, let no man put asunder!
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.