Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Some of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read More"I knew my trip would mean an encounter with Adela Quested": Victoria Olsen reflects on what she found, and what was lost in translation, when she travelled to India with E. M. Forster on her mind.
Read MoreKathleen Rooney's poems in Robinson Alone can be read two ways--as standalone pieces and as connected parts that form a single poetic narrative of a character's life
Read MoreOpen Letters Weekly has been the venue for hundreds of book reviews in 2012. For your reading pleasure and holiday book-buying convenience, we gather them here in chronological order.
Read MoreA look back at Anne Carson's book-length elegy "Nox," in which readers are asked not only to unfold the poetry's symbols and allusions but also the accordion-like book itself.
Read MoreBossophilia: The idolization of Bruce Springsteen that comes from midlife nostalgia and a fear of dying. Steve Danziger confronts the phenomenon, and a new biography.
Read MoreThe fairy tale has been through several metamorphoses; the next might result in its extinction. Max Ross reviews Jack Zipes's cultural history of the genre.
Read MoreWhat does it mean to say “only the music matters?” In her bleakly intelligent new novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz challenges us to consider what we really value in music and how our own demand for superhuman perfection strips it of its soul.
Read MoreIn sparse and contrapuntal verse, familiar words are warped out of their comfortable meanings, and sharpened to juxtapose - but is Joyelle McSweeney's latest experiment a success?
Read MoreRenowned reviewer and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn has a scintillating new collection of his recent work; John Cotter and Steve Donoghue compare notes on "Waiting for the Barbarians"
Read MoreHow can writers depict the fragmented modern soul? For Zadie Smith, the solution is an untidy, fragmented novel. M.K. Hall reviews NW
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 MoreSufi mystics, barbaric yawps, and the comedy of the sexes are what's inside Anthony Madrid's new collection of ghazals. What does our poetry editor make of this puzzling Persian pattern?
Read MoreEmily Pettit turns nonsense into horse sense, or goat sense, in her new collection Goat in the Snow
Read MoreMadman, lothario, despot, drug fiend, friend and enemy of Mussolini - and immortal poet. Gabriele D'Annunzio was all of these things and many more in his whirlwind of a life.
Read MoreJulio Cortázar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez brought Latin American fiction to the attention of the world. Now a young crop of writers are trying to move beyond magical realism--a new anthology charts the diverse approaches.
Read MoreWhat does the soul-searching writer do when the concept of the soul--to say nothing of God--has lost its currency? Two new confessional novels try to navigate that uncharted territory.
Read MoreIt’s a bridge, a barrier, and a burden; it’s used in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the outhouse. Leah Price helps us think again about what we can, should, or want to do with that most fetishized of objects: the book.
Read MoreThe worlds of fine art, porno, hollywood, meth addiction, and quality lit cross and recombine in Bruce Wagner's latest Dead Stars. We made this culture, now what do we make of it?
Read MoreMyth and fairy tale seem as far from true as can be, but Feng Sun Chen's poetry uses them to explore the necessities and unavoidable transformations of life.
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