Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
The box office record-setting movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is the latest incarnation of an unsettling children-as-prey plot that's been with us in one form or another for a long time - and never more vividly than in Koushun Takami's Battle Royale
Read MoreThe work of the Roman poet Catullus has always challenged the received idioms of poetry and society, and a daring new translation both underscores and undermines that iconoclastic Catullan stance.
Read MoreWhen the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2010, it was given to an empty chair. Its recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was in prison for advocating human rights in China. Though he is still incarcerated, a collection of essays sheds light on his thought and struggle.
Read MoreLong-time critic John Sutherland's latest book The Lives of the Novelists takes readers on a biographical tour of 294 creators' lives. But does it work? Long-time critic Steve Donoghue and novelist John Cotter try to figure that out.
Read MoreIn The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson evokes the brutality of North Korea's authoritarian regime by way of an over-the-top love story. Joyce W. Lee investigates whether torture and romance can coexist in one novel.
Read MoreOf his 60+ books, one in particular, The United States, is best representative of his work as a whole and, by readers, best loved. On the Collected Essays of Gore Vidal.
Read MoreFor two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers - and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.
Read MoreElizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreWhere would Lionel Trilling, godfather of the liberal imagination, fit into our contemporary culture of ideas? And how much of that culture is of his making?
Read MoreMost criticism is reactive, but in his essay "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson proved prophetic. He set a challenge and Walt Whitman took him up on it.
Read MoreRichard Poirier was one of the great bridge-builders--his sorely neglected classic A World Elsewhere drew upon the writing of Emerson but presciently anticipated the postmodernist ideas that would soon enter the mainstream.
Read MoreThe best of Anthony Lane's many New Yorker reviews and essays were collected in Nobody's Perfect, a big volume that amply displays this writer's wit and subtlety.
Read MoreIs there more to romance fiction than perfect people meeting cute and living happily ever after? Sarah Wendell thinks so, but her arguments in defense of this most reviled of genres may themselves sell it short.
Read MoreHow should we relate to our cities? To ourselves? Kate Schapira couldn't be asking more important questions in her latest collections of poems, How We Saved The City, and The Bounty: Four Addresses
Read MoreEli Gottlieb's novels are built on dissimulation: lies to be cruel, lies to be kind ... how does this formula hold in The Face Thief, and what is Gottlieb getting at?
Read MoreThis new novel has all the grit, violence, and hopelessness we expect of the noir sub-genre, but here it's infused with an almost philosophical edge.
Read MoreTom McCarthy's Derrida-inspired linguistic and narrative fixations are once again on full display in Men in Space, his first novel now reissued after the popularity of Remainder and C
Read MoreNobody would accuse the mature Larkin of being a greeting card poet, and yet a warm and even vulnerable sentimentality bubbles up in his verse, often when it's least expected.
Read MoreAyad Akhtar's debut novel American Dervish describes joins a Pakistani-American boy's coming-of-age story with the exploration of a Muslim family's assimilation into picket-fenced suburbs. What traditions will be kept or compromised? And more importantly, how well does the author present his vision?
Read MoreIf anything's taboo in our society it's a thoughtful, humanistic portrait of a terrorist, which is why more established writers failed where Jarett Kobek delivers something new.
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