Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is certainly a visual treat: it’s the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens with deckle edges, French flaps, and an eye-catching wrap-around cover by Tom Haugomat, who faithfully signposts the novel’s most famous imagery: a boy in a graveyard, figures in a boat, sooty London, etc. This […]
Read MoreRenowned socialite Bunny Mellon, who made headlines for an entire century, gets a big, generous new biography.
Read MoreA small portion of the life of one famous Venetian palace is told through the lives of three remarkable women who ruled it in the 20th century.
Read MoreThe roots of new Chinese nationalism extend back through well over a century of foreign meddling, as a comprehensive new history shows.
Read MoreOur book today is a romance novel revolving around the US football season and so by rights ought to feel like an autumn book. But Jaci Burton’s The Final Score, one of Burton’s “Play-by-Play” sports romances, features a Claudio Marinesco cover and enough hot-and-heavy bedroom action to make it a last-day-of-summer reading experience. The basic […]
Read MoreA massive new study looks at the Cold War as a world war, touching - and often toppling - governments far from Washington or Moscow.
Read MorePaganism scholar Ronald Hutton's fascinating new book delves into the long history of the witch in human societies.
Read MoreAmerica in the sordid wilderness years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the 20th century is the focus of the newest volume in the mighty Oxford History of the United States.
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noticed on rare occasions in the past, are quietly awe-inspiring, and this certainly applies to a new addition to the line, The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers, edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, who also write the volume’s introductory essay. The Penguin Portables are always highlights of […]
Read MoreThe fates of three very different Irish brothers in prewar Manhattan intertwine in Brendan Mathews' impressive debut novel.
Read MoreOur book today has a front cover positively festooned with possible titles, and no referee standing close at hand to declare one the winner. There’s a banner at the top that says “Earth Before Us.” Then right in the center in big green letters there’s Dinosaur Empire! And down at the bottom there’s a label-looking […]
Read MoreAn '80s club kid wises up and gets all sad and melancholy in Jarett Kobek's follow-up to this surprise hit "I Hate the Internet"
Read MoreIt wasn't a fat, sick, wife-killing madman who came to the English throne in 1509 - as a new book reminds readers, it was a glorious teenage prince.
Read More"The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells gets an authorized sequel in which you-know-who are back for another shot at conquering the Earth.
Read MoreAn enormous earthquake is an inevitable feature of America's near future, and yet as Kathryn Miles' gripping new book makes clear, the country is completely, willfully unprepared.
Read MoreA smart new novel looks back through fractured viewpoints at the dramatic events of a party at an English country house.
Read MoreThe bitter final weeks of the American Civil War form backdrop of Ralph Peters' dark, powerful latest novel.
Read MoreOne of the most outspoken critics of the official version of 9-11 now writes a wide-ranging assessment of the long-term consequences of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Read MoreAn impressive new history details the many sides of the fighting that came to the French Riviera during the Second World War
Read MoreA new book contends that one particular year in the wake of the First World War changed the literary landscape forever.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.