Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
In the future, a vast corporation sends operatives back in time to loot the past, and those operatives have one rule above all others: bring nobody back with you. When one of those operatives breaks that rule, Wesley Chu's novel takes off
Read MoreTime and again in the history of life, environmental pressures and biological systems combine to produce the same adaptations in wildly different species and epochs. It's called convergent evolution, and Simon Conway Morris has written its grand opera.
Read MoreA decorated Roman soldier accompanies a dangerous mission into barbarian territory in 4th century Britain
Read MoreThe forgotten Midwestern town of Normandy Falls becomes the setting for an increasingly horrifying - and surreal - series of events in Kevin Keating's outstanding new novel
Read MoreOur book today is an amplified edition of Obiter Dicta, which English politician Augustine Birrell first published in 1885 but had occasion to re-issue a couple of times between 1885 and 1890. The book is a collection of some of the literary pieces Birrell was always working on while also serving in various governments at […]
Read MoreIn "Hostile Takeover," Shane Kuhn provides a raucous follow-up to his popular novel "The Intern's Handbook"
Read MoreTwo brothers - one simple-minded, the other quite possibly devious - are at the heart of Stuart Prebble's new thriller
Read MoreI’m one of many periodical readers, I suspect, who read Usman Malik’s superb mini-essay “Rockets, Robots, and Reckless Imagination” in The Herald magazine out of Pakistan; the piece has been linked and shared liberally since it appeared a couple of days ago, and deservedly so. In a little over 2000 words, Malik manages to write […]
Read MoreJust in time for America's Independence Day, the Library of America presents its newest production: a two-volume collection of some of the pamphlets that so inflamed the colonial population in the decade leading up to the Revolution
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have perfect timing. Not many, as you’d expect, since the line deals primarily in works of literature that are specifically timeless – but in some cases, the when can mean a lot even alongside the what, and today is one of those case: a pretty new Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s […]
Read MoreThree sisters and their various husbands and children gather at the family's inviting old Cape Cod vacation home, where they face drama, revelation, heartache, and maybe personal re-invention.
Read MoreA wealthy family in dazzling 1920s Newport, Rhode Island faces problems and revelations in both the material world of their huge estate - and also in the spirit world, where secrets will be revealed
Read MoreIn the early 1720s, the regent of France risked both his young king and his young daughter on high-stakes international gambles in the ongoing War of Succession; a sparkling new novel dramatizes the events
Read MoreOur book today is Old Friends, a 1909 collection of typically syrupy reminiscences put down on paper by the then-legendary drama critic and theater historian William Winter, who immediately sets about answering the charge of a Boston book-critic that he was a “mere maunder, sodden with lazy idolatry for days gone by.” “Let not those […]
Read MoreIn Wednesday Martin's now-infamous scathing account, we learn the appalling personal details of the wives of Manhattan's rich and famous
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics – including this, the final entrant in our little parade this time around – are eye-opening in a way that a single reprint of a single classic seldom is. Medievalists Ad Putter and Myra Stokes have taken one of keystone works of English literature – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, beloved […]
Read MoreA brutal assassination in 1537 changed the course of Florentine history, and eleven years later, the assassin was himself murdered. Case closed? A fascinating new book thinks not!
Read MoreA thousand years ago, a refined lady at the Japanese Court wrote the first and one of the greatest novels of all time, The Tale of Genji; Dennis Washburn does the latest translation of this immense work, with stunning results.
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics would infuriate their authors, and that’s almost always a good thing – certainly so in the case of an absolutely lovely and subtly subversive new volume called When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales by W. B. Yeats, edited by a Yeats scholar who actually has Yeatsian name: Rob […]
Read MoreFifteen hundred years ago, the inhabitants of northeastern Canada encounter intruders from over the sea: Vikings
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.