Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our books today are a trio of delights from the good folks at Avon Books, and they come at just the right moment: despite the calendar showing a mid-March date, and despite Springlike temperatures only a few days ago, a monstrous blizzard is grinding its way toward Boston at this moment, threatening to bury budding […]
Read MoreOur book today is a towering classic of ecological literature: The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the book she wrote in 1947 in protest to a whole slate of proposed (and encroaching) drainage and construction projects designed to “improve” the vast waterlands of the Everglades. Douglas was a pint-sized force of nature, […]
Read MoreOur book today is Brazilian illustrator Vin Vogel’s follow-up to his 2015 classic The Thing About Yetis – joyful news to those of us who loved that book and its roly-poly head-tufted version of the famed Himalayan snow-man. The new book from Penguin’s Dial Books imprint is called BedTime for Yeti, and it opens by […]
Read MoreA ten-year anniversary is a milestone for any kind of monthly publication. The meshing of personalities, the jostling of priorities, and the unpredictable vagaries of the work-flow might be expected to hang together for a little while, a year maybe, and it might be hoped they could work for a little longer than that, perhaps […]
Read MorePoor innocent Lady Jane Grey has been an ostentatious martyr to the Protestant cause for centuries; a new book tells her brief but familiar life story as continues.
Read MoreOur book today is a gutsy historical thriller from 2011 called Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr, the eighth novel featuring his scuffed and downtrodden detective – and reluctant SS member – Bernie Gunther, solving crimes and trying to keep his morals clean in WWII-era Germany. In this particular installment, he’s been summoned to Prague by […]
Read MoreOur book today is the paperback release of a history that’s near and dear to my daily routine: Devin Leonard’s utterly delightful Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, brought out Grove Press last year to nerdishly enthusiastic reviews (including one from USA Today that included the simple, true line, […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics breathe with the towering wisdom of the world’s great literary figures. And then there’s Voltaire. The voluminous writings of Francois-Marie Arouet have been a mother-quarry of pseudo-profundity for over two centuries, of course, so in that respect this slim new volume from Penguin – a new translation by Desmond Clarke of the […]
Read MoreOur book today is the English-language translation of Andrea Molesini’s utterly remarkable debut novel Not All Bastards Are From Vienna. The book originally appeared in 2010 and is here translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh, and although I chuckled about it when the Englished version appeared last year (how could I […]
Read MoreOur book today is a delectable trifle, the perfect thing to brighten up a day-long snowstorm: The Duke, the first of author Kerrigan Byrne’s romance novels to break the lock-step of glottal fricatives that characterized The Highwayman, The Hunter, and The Highlander and strike out into new consonantal territory (will it be followed by The […]
Read MoreOur book today is a bright little thing of wonder housed, this time around, in a brittle package: it’s a selection of the writings of John Burroughs called The Birds of John Burroughs: Keeping a Sharp Lookout, a volume published in 1976 by Hawthorn Books, edited by Jack Kligerman with nice stately black-and-white illustrations by […]
Read MoreYet another terrific week for DC Comics … which still feels distinctly odd to say. For the last five years or so, while DC’s lineup of iconic superheroes was in the throes of the company’s “New 52” continuity remake, I mostly dreaded seeing the titles on offer every week at Boston’s one-and-only Comicopia. From the […]
Read MoreA new book on the famous Tudor dynasty promises that most alluring of all perspectives on royalty: the back-stage details. But can it succeed? A Year with the Tudors continues.
Read MoreOur book today at first almost seems like a blasphemy: it’s The Travels of Mark Twain from 1961, and its seeming blasphemy comes from the fact that Charles Neider is its editor rather than its author. Rather than a work of history and analysis about Mark Twain’s extensive travels, as its title might indicate, it’s […]
Read MoreI couldn’t help but be charmed by the long essay by Joseph Epstein in last week’s Weekly Standard, despite its barrage of annoying ticks and quirks. The piece is called “Hitting Eighty,” and it’s the latest (and – sad thought – the last?) in what turns out to be a little series of pieces Epstein […]
Read MoreThe week’s comics reflected a very, very old pattern of mine: buying for artists rather than writers. It would be wrong to say that for most of my comics-buying life I cared much more about a title’s artwork than about its writing; far closer to the truth to say I didn’t care about the writing […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Inevitable Guest: A Survival Guide to Being Company & Having Company on Cape Cod, a spirited but ultimately hopeless 2000 book by Marcia Monbleau, writing from the hallowed precincts of Harwich Port. I took it down from its shelf in a perversely contrarian moment, since the book is about the […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics almost play tricks on your memory, you’re so certain you’ve seen them before in earlier editions. Surely, for instance, any sizable US Penguin Classics library going back a few decades will already have a big fat volume of Percy Bysshe Shelley? And yet no! When I first clapped eyes on the big, […]
Read MoreA crackerjack week at the comics shop here in Boston, and while I was reading and really enjoying the three new issues I bought at the Android’s Dungeon, I couldn’t help but notice that these are characters I’ve been reading about for a long, long time! I got the latest issues of three iconic superheroes, […]
Read MoreJane Seymour is in many ways the most elusive of all the wives of King Henry VIII, dying just weeks after giving the king his longed-for male heir. A new novel delves into the human connection between Henry and his third wife.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.