Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Some Penguin Classics don’t really seem to need updating. One such solid-looking piece of work is the translation David McDuff did for Penguin Classics of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1860 novel The House of the Dead. That translation appeared in 1985, and it – and all other translations of this particular book – are suddenly threatened […]
Read MoreIn 1503, the city of Florence commissioned two artists to paint the walls of their city hall - two men named Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. A new book assesses the after-effects of this greatest of all artistic competitions.
Read MoreOur books today are … all of them, every book I currently possess here in the quaint, white-painted confines of Hyde Cottage. Over the course of 2014 in particular, I was reminded again and again of a process every bit as mysterious and insidious as the disappearance of odd socks from the dryer: the steady, […]
Read MoreA easily-accessible new guidebook to our home solar system
Read MoreThe revamped Man of Steel embarks on a new series of adventures in Action Comics
Read MoreThe scout for a fur-trapping party in 1823 is mauled by a bear and left for dead - but he doesn't die, which is very bad news for the fur-trapping company in Michael Punke's super-effective novel
Read MoreHistorical novelist Andrew Levkoff stuffs the last installment of his "Bow of Heaven" trilogy with battles, love, loyalty betrayed, crucifixion, cross-purposes, loyalty regained, and deep reflections on what it all means.
Read MoreDavid Dickson's comprehensively researched, readable book details the long and complicated history of Dublin
Read MoreA new history presents a history of 20th-Century American radical evangelism that will go down very well on the Liberty University campus
Read MoreAn enormous, bad-tempered horse tramples to death the wife of its aristocratic owner - but Joe Sandilands of Scotland Yard comes to suspect foul play in Barbara Cleverly's new mystery
Read MoreHe was ugly, ill-dressed, and eccentrically fond of dogs - but he was also the most experienced military man in the American colonies, restlessly chaffing under the command of George Washington. He was General Charles Lee, and a wonderful new book tells his story.
Read MoreThis is a tricky category, of course; it wanders over its nearest borders with a good deal of recklessness. Some of this year’s top Nonfiction picks might just as easily qualify as history, for example some species of sociology, or even biography, but against its oddness I every year lay its unfailing ability to get […]
Read MoreThis year’s list of the worst malefactors in the Republic of Letters in 2014 could really have been boiled down to one entrant (which will become evident, and which all of you should be heartily ashamed of making so popular), and that entrant perfectly typifies exactly the same kind of cold-eyed arrogance that characterized the […]
Read MoreLong before he would be venerated as the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer had a really, really bad year. An engaging new book tells the story of how he coped - and the great work that followed.
Read MoreThere are some years when the practitioners of fiction seem almost embarrassed by their profession – not because that profession still hasn’t turned its back on own charlatans, but rather because it sometimes seems like the reading public itself is increasingly turning its back on their profession in favor of pap. I’ve lost count of […]
Read MoreIt’s always a lurking danger when dealing with novels, novelists being by nature the vilest narcissists this side of book reviewers, but this year it runs the table in the “Worst Fiction” department: arrogance. Specifically, the belief on the author’s part that they, and not their stories, are the proper object of their readers’ attention. […]
Read MoreA new book looks at the writings of Cicero, Sallust, and Horace to understand the mind of their times.
Read MoreThis, as long-time Stevereads readers (and my long-suffering friends) may know, is the nerve center of my reading, my favorite of the genres in which I roam. More than historical fiction, which I’ve actually written (and whose self-published ranks I regularly patrol as the U.S. “Indie” Editor for the redoubtable Historical Novel Review), and more […]
Read MoreIt’s always when I read a lot of history (and I read more new history in 2014 than in any previous year of my life) that I wonder even more intensely than usual why anybody would ever read anything else. Here, after all, are the stories of mankind in all its unpredictable voracity, told by […]
Read MoreThe genre of fiction in 2014 was too anemic to warrant an Honor Roll, but this wasn’t the case at all for other genres, many of which fielded works so strongly they readily overflowed the arbitrary 10-title limit of my ‘Best’ lists. In 2014, Honor Rolls were easily possible for four or five such genres, […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.