Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Comrade Loves of the Samurai, a pokey little translation by E. Powys Mathers from way back in 1928, when it appeared in a privately-published set of high-class smut called Eastern Love. The set featured two books: selections from the Nanshoku Okagami of the great 17th century Japanese author Saikaku Ihara, here […]
Read MoreA young woman's life is turned upside-down when she encounters a strange man with a molten red hand.
Read MoreThe hitman who kills hitmen is contracted by a semi-rogue FBI agent to take on a particularly delicate - and dangerous - side-mission
Read MoreOur book today is Cape Cod Yesterdays, which bestselling novelist Joseph C. Lincoln dashed off in 1935 and which went through his customary flurry of reprints, since the man was a storyteller with a golden touch, an immensely popular bestselling author of a century ago who built a large chunk of his career on his […]
Read MoreFor a century, humans have been searching for any sign of extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise. A new book tells the story of that quest - and keeps its geeky hope alive.
Read MoreA hard-hitting new book exposes the widespread misdiagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Read MoreOur book today is that saddest of all kinds of books, the superseded classic. In this case, we’re talking about The Penguin Book of English Verse – not the massive 2004 version edited in all its splendor by Paul Keegan but rather the 1956 version edited by John Hayward, who had the old-fashioned chutzpah to […]
Read MoreBefore the famous epic battles of the First World War, there were lesser-known but equally ferocious clashes that are often lost in the larger narrative. A short, powerful book seeks to redress that imbalance.
Read MoreThe companion book to the 2015 production of "Poldark" turns out to be more than just a pretty face
Read MoreDoctor and poet Giovanni Marrasio's verses receive an expert new edition from the Harvard's I Tatti Library series
Read MoreOur book today is a pretty little gem unearthed from the bargain carts of my beloved Brattle Bookshop: the 1917 classic Birds Worth Knowing by the American author who wrote under the pen name Neltje Blanchan. This particular edition was issued in 1923 as part of the Little Nature Library put out by Doubleday, and […]
Read MoreSnake expert Ted Levin argues in his captivating new book that the American rattlesnake is as misunderstood as it is miraculous.
Read MoreOur book today is surely one of the all-time classics of the Ink Chorus: Claud Cockburn’s 1972, er, bestseller Bestseller, in which our author subjects a dozen bygone bestselling novels to a forensic examination that’s both erudite and often hilarious, biting but also oddly sympathetic. He takes a tour through some of the bestselling novels […]
Read MoreVeteran editor Terry McDonell writes a ribald memoir that's half storytelling and half tips of the trade
Read MoreOn the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Star Trek gets a definitive oral history.
Read MoreI clearly wasn’t the only reader of the mighty TLS who was disappointed by Julian Baggini’s cover article about the ethics of eating animals! I went into the piece with high hopes, which in retrospect I see now was a bit foolish, and Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals felt the […]
Read MoreA gritty and gripping new history tells the story of the dawn of aerial warfare.
Read MoreA crippled young man in a forgotten hospital has armored himself against the rotten hand he's drawn in life - until he falls in love with a new patient.
Read MoreOur book today is a wonderful little classic of popular natural history: David Lack’s The Life of the Robin from 1943, in which Lack takes everything known about robins from literature, poetry, and science and pulls it all together to craft a portrait-in-the-round of one of England’s most common birds. “Into the world of the […]
Read MoreThe heroine of Mary Robinette Kowal's enchanting new novel is doing her part for the WWI war effort - by debriefing the spirits of soldiers killed on the battlefield
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.