Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Celebrated biographer H. W. Brands has written the first full-dress of Ronald Reagan since the former president's death in 2004 - but does Reagan elude him, as he has so many biographers? Steve Donoghue reviews.
Read MoreThe ecstasy and anguish of falling in love have been the stuff of poetry for thousands of years - but do they boil down to the workings of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline? Jane Schmidt reviews a new look at romantic love.
Read MorePoet, dramatist, and author of the great Italian novel I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni led a life as fascinating as his fiction. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story of the Father of Italian Prose.
Read MoreA wunderkind of the Canadian theater world writes an impassioned manifesto about everything that's wrong with the theater world - with better results than you'd expect
Read MoreRenowned classicist and historian Peter Green has at last produced a translation of the Iliad - and it comes with its own Greek Chorus. Steve Donoghue investigates.
Read MoreA sumptuous new Library of America volume contains a rich sampling of the work of Reinhold Niebuhr - whom reviewer Robert Minto refers to as "the premiere establishment theologian of the 20th century."
Read MoreSchubert's bleak, tumultuous song cycle, Winterreise, is the subject of tenor Ian Bostridge's passionate new book. Greg Waldmann examines Schubert's Winter Journey, and the trouble with hard-to-love classical music.
Read MoreFrom Wallace Stevens to Seamus Heaney to Jorie Graham, the latest collection of critical pieces by Helen Vendler celebrates the worth of a wide array of writers. Jack Hanson reviews The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.
Read MoreInto an unremarkable marriage comes a major disruption: the wife stops eating meat. Suddenly, everything in their usually orderly world goes out of control.
Read MoreMichael Pye's new book provides a rich history of the North Sea in human culture - and pokes holes in some crass nationalist myth-making along the way. Matt Ray reviews The Edge of the World.
Read MoreHilary Mantel's best-selling Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have made their way to the stage on the expert handling of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zach Rabiroff had front row center.
Read MoreIn Michel Houellebecq’s uncannily timely new novel, the triumph of an Islamist government relieves the dreary banality that defines the secular France of the 21st century.
Read MoreTraditional cynicism has always maintained that Benjamin Disraeli married Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis primarily for her money, but a new book argues that the real picture was a good deal more complex - and interesting - than that.
Read MoreThese fairies of the air are among the most beautiful sights of summer. They're also 300 million years old and honed killing machines. A new book of photography shows us dragonflies as we've never seen them.
Read MoreAuthor Jacob Silverman contends in his new book that the intrusions of social media into our private lives has reached sometimes intolerable extents. But what does he mean by "intolerable"? And who is he counting as "our"?
Read MoreIn his painting "Figure on a Bed," John Koch immortalizes the kind of private moment that's usually lost in an instant - Brett Busang muses on one arresting piece of art.
Read MoreSet in the precarious territory between fiction and history, Nicolas Rothwell’s beautiful, haunting Belomor explores the ways storytelling serves as an impetus for self-discovery.
Read MoreThe 2nd Light Battalion King's Division played a pivotal role at the Battle of Waterloo, as a slim new history by Brendan Simms demonstrates. Matt Ray reviews the book in his Open Letters debut.
Read MoreThe star translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (aided this time by Richard Nelson) translate Turgenev's A Month in the Country, with predictably disruptive results. Jack Hanson reviews.
Read MoreAmerican senator, author, and statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan's complex and constantly-evolving political philosophy is the subject of a pointed new book
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