Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Bestselling author of Tudor historical fiction Philippa Gregory takes up the familiar tragedy of Lady Jane Grey - and her forgotten but equally compelling sisters - in her new book, as A Year with the Tudors II continues.
Read MoreMary Shelley's indomitable horror classic gets a sumptuous new annotated edition.
Read MoreThe editors of Vanity Fair magazine delve into their century of writing to serve up dozens of their best writers writing about other writers.
Read MoreLong before Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Russian thinkers and writers were haltingly, passionately fashioning their own peculiar brand of Enlightment
Read MoreThe great Renaissance classic gets a spryly-translated new Norton edition
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 MoreThe Tim Parks essays collected in this pretty volume range over the whole landscape of the book-world, from endangered copyright to foreign-lit chic to the inescapability of Jonathan Franzen
Read MoreIn the latest Princeton "Writers on Writers" installment, novelist Colm Toibin writes about poet Elizabeth Bishop
Read MoreAt the outbreak of the First World War, American writers flocked to Europe and headed for the Western Front in order to find their Muse - and to make some quick cash. A new book follows a handful of these earliest chroniclers
Read MoreFor over a century, Oscar Wilde's notebook on Thomas Chatterton has been regarded as a 'smoking gun' of Wilde's plagiaristic tendencies. A new book radically re-examines the issue
Read MoreFor twenty-five years, the "Table Talk" feature of The Threepenny Review has offered occasional musings on a wide range of topics by some of the best freelance writers and critics in the business. A new hardcover collects a generous helping of highlights
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 MoreA murder, a trip to the dump, and oh yah - September 11. That wacky Thomas Pynchon is at it again!
Read MoreThe meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreIn the famous jingle 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,' Katherine Parr comes last - the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. But she was far more than that - scholar, regent, and passionate young woman - as a new Tudor historical novel attempts to portray
Read More"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreSome of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read MoreOpen Letters Weekly has been the venue for hundreds of book reviews in 2012. For your reading pleasure and holiday book-buying convenience, we gather them here in chronological order.
Read MoreElizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreTeenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.