Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read MoreShin Yu Pai engages with history, tradition, and the world around her in her new collection of poems.
Read MoreTarzan is one of the most popular fictional creations in modern times. Does the Ape Man define something essential in the human experience - or do we keep redefining Tarzan to suit our ever-changing needs?
Read MoreThe slim body of work of the late New York poet Rachel Wetzsteon skips the faux-Horatian filigree in favor of an unsentimental depiction of modern life and contradictory emotion. And yet, her poems are both outspoken and intimate, and Manhattan is her Rome. Horace might have been flattered after all.
Read MoreMatt Taibbi is the foremost political-writing muckraker of his generation, matching an acerbic wit with a pressure-cooked prose style. But is there substance behind the bluster?
Read MoreFor nearly three decades, Sara Paretsky has used the familiar form of the private eye novel to turn a critical eye on contemporary America. Rohan Maitzen reviews the latest in her V.I. Warshawski series.
Read MoreYou think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble... Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham's paradoxical novel "By Nightfall".
Read MoreMolly Allgood was only a young, up-and-coming actress when her fiance J.M. Synge died of cancer. Joseph O'Connor's novel "The Ghost Light" imagines how the rest of her life played out in the shadow of that loss.
Read MoreLance Olsen's page-turning experimental novel-in-stories mugs, flirts, ends the world, and dares the reader to make a rondel of intuitive leaps.
Read MoreAssimilation is the nightmare of Joshua Cohen's daring novel "Witz," and the book is therefore designed to be strange and prickly to the gentiles who try to read it.
Read MoreTom McCarthy's new palimpsest of microscripts, C, attempts a new technocratic and poetical re-imagining of its protagonist's life story. What's at stake, and what's won?
Read More"A Glyn Maxwell poem encourages us towards an emotion or a point of view not by stating it, often not even by showing it, but by bringing us in stages to cooperate in doing the work of recreating it."
Read MoreEver since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes -- and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
Read MoreJohn le Carré not only has a new novel -- all his old ones are being inducted into the pantheon of UK Penguin Classics. Has this indefatigable crafter of spy novels transformed into the litterateur in our lifetime?
Read MoreIn Yoko Ogawa's beautiful, violent take on the Bluebeard legend, a stern old man and a biddable girl meet in a hotel and embark on a sexual journey of surprising poignancy.
Read MoreIn his latest book, Stephen King works in extremely familiar territory -- ordinary people presented with extraordinary moral choices, with a dash of the eerie thrown in. Do an old hand's usual tricks still entertain?
Read MoreFor more than fifty years and more than fifty novels, Louis Auchincloss chronicled the lives of New York's upper class. His last book is a memoir of his life among that upper class -- but is truth stranger than fiction?
Read MoreA teacher seduced by the fame of his star pupil? Or two great minds meeting despite differences in age and station? Annabel Lyon's celebrated new novel "The Golden Mean" dramatizes the relationship between Aristotle and the boy who would go on to become Alexander the Great.
Read MoreEmma Donoghue's story of a boy raised in perfect (if penitential) solitude with his mother and then thrust into the wide world is parable about the isolation of affection--or is it a commentary on how alien our society has become?
Read MoreA new book argues that Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst stampeded the United States into the Spanish-American War to feed imperial ambition and sell some newspapers. Are the roots of modern America rotten?
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