Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Viper, the latest Giovanni de Maurizio murder mystery from Europa Editions. It’s the sixth installment in the series starring sad, intense young Commissario Ricciardi of the 1930s Naples police force. The sub-title of this one is “No Resurrection for Commissario Ricciardi,” and fans of the series – among which in Boston […]
Read MoreThree impressionable young 13th-century Franciscans embark on an improbably odyssey to bring a momentous manuscript to the Pope
Read MoreThe sun was shining yesterday in Boston, which was so strange after the last 90 days that I looked at the city, seeing it with the fresh realization that Boston has managed to survive a genuine battering of storms and cold and storms and cold. It wasn’t an easy survival, of course, and it was […]
Read MoreIn a world very much like our own, super-powered clandestine operatives vie with each other on missions to save or destroy humanity
Read MoreEvery day, all around us, everything solid is inexorably corroding into powder. A game new book takes readers inside the surprisingly fascinating world of rust
Read MoreOur book today is a truly beautiful thing from 2014, The David Foster Wallace Reader, a collaboration between Little, Brown and Wallace’s literary trust that aims to create a “Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, an essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallace’s work already and show those new to […]
Read MoreHe established Parliament, hammered the Scots, expelled the Jews, and inspired centuries of biographers - England's King Edward I gets a lively new biography
Read MoreA little while ago, having been trapped indoors by ten-foot snow drifts for a week or two or three, I decided to spend my $5 coupon and go shopping at Book Outlet again, just the way all my favorite enthusiastic young BookTubers do! I browsed for a few days (it’s oddly time-consuming, clicking back through […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics open up windows on alien worlds, and they do so every bit as effectively as the very best sci-fi and fantasy, but through radically different means: by showing us what was, not what wasn’t. A perfect demonstration of this would be the slim and elegant new Penguin Classic edition of Tenzin Chogyel’s […]
Read MoreThe Ottoman Empire joined the fighting of the First World War deeply misunderstood by both sides; a charismatic new book seeks to clarify the story of that odd meeting of East and West
Read MoreInk Chorus Our book today is one of the de facto Bibles of the Ink Chorus: Books of the Century, a 2000 update of the 1998 anthology of book reviews and author interviews from the first century of the New York Times Book Review, a great big book with a hideous cover, edited by Charles […]
Read MoreSpecies arrive, thrive, and then go extinct - but after the long and frightful reign of Homo sapiens ... what?
Read MoreSabina, the wife of the enigmatic Roman emperor Hadrian, is beset by enemies in Rome - and safeguards a secret they'd all kill to know ...
Read MoreOur book today is Lamentation by C. J. Sansom, the latest of his books to feature the sleuthing adventures of his hunchback Tudor-era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, following Heartstone way back in 2010. This series began with the quietly wonderful 2003 novel Dissolution, and all the strengths so abundantly on display in that first book have […]
Read MoreA businessman is on a trip to new-money Tunisia when the world's economy goes into meltdown...
Read MoreThanks to the technical wizardry of Open Letters Monthly‘s newest editor, Robert Minto, March debuts a spiffy new look for Stevereads, its first top-to-bottom re-design in almost ten years! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d present a Stevereads alphabet to help orient the hordes of new readers Robert has unconditionally guaranteed me will be […]
Read MoreWhen Homo sapiens appeared in Europe 45,000 years ago, most of the long-established species there - including the Neanderthals - began to disappear. Did Homo sapiens wipe them out? And if so, did they have help from somebody right there in your living room?
Read MoreIn this New York Times bestseller, a hapless woman spots a mysterious event from the window of her commuter train and is soon caught up in a police investigation.
Read MoreOur book today goes by a title Stevereads has already anointed as alluring: To Wake the Mangog! (I added the exclamation point that the book’s own packagers shamefully omitted) – it’s a thick volume in Marvel Comics’ ongoing “Epic Collection” series of color reprints from the archives. This is the fourth “Epic Collection” of Thor […]
Read MoreUnder the direction of Oliver Cromwell, dozens of men deliberated to execute the captive King Charles I, and when Charles II came to power a decade later, those men were suddenly in the gravest danger. A fascinating new book tells their stories.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.