Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Best Books of 2016 – Romance! Even in the darkest of times — and, although the fact may not be immediately apparent, 2016 was the darkest year in United States history – the Romance genre can be relied upon to divert, to catch me up in all its fictional squabbles with their ironclad-foretold outcomes, to […]
Read MoreBest Book of 2016 – Debuts! As usual, the survey of a year’s fiction debuts is nerve-wracking. Here are the luckiest of the lucky, the few out of the hopeful many who dreamed of achieving the damn-near impossible and getting their debut fiction through the gauntlet of agents, editors, publishers, and bookstore buyers and into […]
Read MoreA master historian analyzes the tumultuous century that gave rise to the modern era
Read MoreThe Best Books of 2016 – YA! 2016 was a watershed year for me when it comes to Young Adult fiction. Prior to this year, I’d thought of the YA genre as a sludgy cesspool of second-rate prose, a place where talentless authors pander to the insecurities, inexperience, and near-cosmic megalomania of the average teenager […]
Read MoreBest Books of 2016: Translations! An old literary crony of mine recently got back in touch in order to complain about book reviewers who make evaluative comments about the quality of translations that are made from languages they don’t know (your average book-critic being resolutely monoglot). I’d often made the same complaint: there I’d be, […]
Read MorePoor Simon Lewis has been a human, and he's been a vampire - and now he's a student at the forbidding Shadowhunter Academy, in the latest chapter of Cassandra Clare's ongoing YA fantasy series
Read MoreBest Books of 2016 – Reprints! Once again we kick off the high opera that is the Stevereads Best – and Worst – Books of the Year by checking the state of the book-world’s memory, looking at the strength and variety of its reprints. And as in most recent years, 2016 shows some remarkably healthy […]
Read MoreIt’s that time of year again here at Stevereads! It’s time for my annual year-end round-up of the Year’s Best – and Worst – Books, and I have a wider field to cover in 2016 than I’ve had in any previous year: I’ve already read more books in 2016 than in any previous year of […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, especially in the last few years, are guaranteed to surprise even the most veteran Penguin- watcher. Sometimes this can be disappointingly puzzling – Wellington’s battlefield dispatches, anyone? – and at other times this broad-minded new sense of inclusiveness can be utterly delightful. An amazing example of this latter instance is a new […]
Read MoreFor the thousands of US and Allied troops who were ordered to remain behind and help rebuilt countries the Allies had just defeated, their war was extended and altered. A new book dissects the on-the-ground realities attending the aftermath of conquest.
Read MoreA standout for DC Comics this week, part of the company’s ongoing “Rebirth” line of titles slightly revamping the continuity that was itself revamped six years ago in the company’s “New 52” revamp, is issue #10 of Nightwing, in which the fan-favorite character moves to the seedy city of Blüdhaven with which he was so […]
Read MoreOur books today are three quick bursts of color and gaiety to brighten up a December day as winter, delayed and tentative, at last begins to close its grip on the city of Boston. Temperatures in the 20s (F) are in the immediate forecast for the first time in ten months, the other morning featured […]
Read MoreOur book today is a garrulous little delight from 1939, The Literary Life and the Hell with It, by Whit Burnett, the founder (along with his wonderful wife Martha Foley, the brains of the outfit) and long-time editor of Story magazine. Martha Foley had a fantastic ear for prose in English and a nearly-infallible instinct […]
Read MoreThe gripping true story of celebrated KGB assassin - and defector.
Read MoreBack in 1989, inexplicably popular comic book artist Bryan Hitch was given control of DC Comics bestselling iconic “New 52” series Justice League of America and began a multi-part storyline called “Power and Glory,” in which Rao, the god of Superman’s lost homeworld Krypton, turns up alive and well on Earth one day and starts […]
Read MoreOur book today is a slim little thing from 1927: Advice to a Young Reviewer, a quick mini-pamphlet dashed off at white heat by Edward Copleston, who was born in Devon in 1776, attended Oxford, and became Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St. Paul’s in 1828. Copleston was apparently a feisty old codger of […]
Read MoreThe mesmerizing lunatic who grafted himself onto the Romanov dynasty in its final decades gets a highly detailed new biography.
Read MoreA lavish new production dramatizes the tensions between royalty and personhood in the House of Windsor. Steve Donoghue reviews The Crown.
Read MoreAn invigorating new history looks at the American Revolution from a wide-angle international view
Read MoreSelf-preservation these days requires not only skipping wholesale the front sections of all the political magazines to which I subscribe but also physically tearing them off their staples and discarding them, so that not even a stray glance falls on their appalling content. I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now and face […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.