Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
"Perhaps a little drunk might answer" was Phillips Brooks's idea of how to view Pre-Raphaelite art, several masterpieces of which he commissioned for Trinity Church. "Centerpiece" continues.
Read MoreCan a famously cold and impersonal writer like Paul Auster make a memoir of aging that works against his strengths? And are they strengths after all?
Read MoreESP-Disk', the cult record label from Bernard Stollman, was known for two things: extraordinary, eclectic recordings and horrendous business practices. A new oral history sheds light on the glorious mess.
Read MoreThe Walking Dead, the hit TV series adapted from the zombie-apocalypse comics, offers fans a gripping and subversive take on the accidents of survival.
Read MoreCBC's landmark scare series is available online at last. Where did such a strange series come from and where has it been all this time?
Read MoreTheir brains - their digits - their eyes - their locomotion - their families - their staggeringly long reign over the planet Earth: it's all here, and much, much more. The greatest dinosaur reference work just got even better.
Read MoreElection-weary Americans might wonder why anybody in their right minds would elect to play a video-game presidential contest - but the process can be oddly enlightening.
Read MoreThe first biography of David Foster Wallace is out and it's hardly the sort of book he himself would have written -- or read. Might this be for the best?
Read MoreLord Castlereagh lives in infamy as the target of the Romantic Poets' most vicious insults, but one biography tries to salvage his reputation. Was the statesman a scourge of liberalism or pragmatist of Enlightenment ideals?
Read MoreHow is Hollywood like a clever boy who never tries? In every way imaginable. The story of two Total Recalls is a sad one indeed.
Read MoreWas General Zhukov the greatest general to order mass executions of his own soldiers? Was he the single most decisive factor in beating Hitler? A new biography opens more questions than it answers.
Read MoreHe started an artist on the path to glory, sold a million toys, and inspired a cult classic movie: He's Flash Gordon, and his earliest Sunday adventures are getting a deluxe reprint series.
Read MoreCan plants see and smell and hear? Can they think? Daniel Chamovitz's "field guide" to the botanical senses poses those provocative questions, but how well does it answer them?
Read MoreThis summer's London Olympics take us back to 1981's Chariots of Fire, the 1924 Olympics, and the poetry of William Blake. The connection? All remind us of the fragility of glory and our endless wish to make the past present.
Read More"I was seething with unchanneled anger, frustration, and a maddening inability to express myself. In other words, I was perfect for hardcore." Steve Danziger on a misspent youth at CBGB.
Read MoreExpensive new Batman movies have become a Hollywood ritual, but the character has been thrilling readers - and reflecting a constantly-shifting culture - for seventy years
Read MoreA contentious Supreme Court in the headlines is hardly a new thing - nor is the Court being used for partisan politics and the brinksmanship of history, as Noah Feldman's Scorpions makes clear
Read More"A few years ago I started sleepwalking, and (while inconvenient) this is kind of exciting to me, because it's pretty much exactly the mood I'm going for in anything I create." -- a chat with cover artist Adrianne Mathiowetz
Read MoreIn Soviet Russia, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities, but memorized by ordinary people. In the capitalist West, he was feted by the authorities, but ignored by ordinary people. Perhaps it's just as well he thought reality "nonsense or a nuisance."
Read MoreBostonians take pride in the fact that Edgar Allen Poe was born in their city, but there's a good deal more to the story of that birth than literary tourists ever learn - indeed, there may be more to it than anybody's ever known.
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