The Heartless World
/'Everyone knows who won the war,’ runs the refrain of Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast; her newly published 1930 novel about the Spanish Civil War shows what it meant to be a witness to it.
Read MoreWhen One Lives Among Greyhounds
/The stories of British writer H.H. Munro, known by his pen-name Saki, are devastating studies in torment and cruelty; they're also exceptionally funny. A new collection offers a bracing reminder of that duality.
Read MoreNothing Like Being Scared
/Shirley Jackson is best known – infamous, even – for her chilling story “The Lottery.” But it’s her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where battle rages between evil within and without, that’s her masterpiece.
Read MoreJuly 2013 Issue
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Read MoreSecond Glance: Reticent Confessional
/Hospital visits, supermarket checkouts, and casseroles - the odd, unassuming verse of Jenny Bornholdt might leave some critics wondering if it's actually poetry at all. Critic Stephen Akey says her work is intimate yet reserved - and warns us not to expect The Duino Elegies.
Read MoreArendt in New York City
/When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1964, her moral authority was called into question. Now Margarethe von Trotta’s new film Hannah Arendt explores both who has the right and who has the responsibility to speak about the Holocaust.
Read MoreKeeping Up with the Tudors: Him Again
/In the famous jingle 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,' Katherine Parr comes last - the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. But she was far more than that - scholar, regent, and passionate young woman - as a new Tudor historical novel attempts to portray
Read MoreFrom the Archives: Summer Reading 2012 Continues
/Our feature continues, as more Open Letters folk share their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Read MoreFull of High Sentence
/Richard Ford likes complexity, and he filled his novel, The Sportswriter, with sonnet-like weights and counterweights of tangled and gorgeous intricacy. As Spencer Lenfield's reading demonstrates, single sentences can contain worlds.
Read MoreThe Wandering Page
/Modernist poet P. K. Page may be the most important Canadian author you've never heard of. An impressive new biography, replete with examples of Page's poetry and prose, seeks to remedy that.
Read MoreHome from the Raj
/Nice as it is to revisit old friends, readers of Jane Gardam’s latest may end up wondering if all the most interesting things happened somewhere else, at some other time.
Read MoreIt Might Have Been
/In life there are no second chances, no do-overs. But what if we could keep trying until we got it right? Kate Atkinson explores the possibilities in a novel that just might win her a coveted literary prize or two.
Read MoreSnobs of Extraordinary Ability
/In Andre Aciman's latest novel, a man recalls his time as a graduate student at Harvard, revisiting the early days of a long-estranged friendship.
Read MoreRazing Hell
/In a new memoir packed with garbled madness, we get a funhouse-mirror autobiography of the legendary Richard Hell, who did more than anybody to invent punk rock and only haphazardly survived to tell the tale
Read MoreNo Kaddish For Old Men
/Does love create an unbridgeable distance between two souls? Marco Roth's searching memoir of his microbiologist father alternates between longing and numbness in its search for what, if anything, binds fathers and sons
Read MoreInfinite Reflection
/Born of ancient Buddhist philosophy into the fragments of the modern world, Yoko Ogawa's Revenge asks essential questions about what it means to be human.
Read MoreRending the Familiar
/Shane Book’s evocative collection Ceiling of Sticks shows us our familiar world in ways that might surprise even the most jaded reader into optimism about poetry.
Read More“A Crystal Stranger Taking Off Their Mask”
/Constructing a "walrus itself" is a difficult thing to do - but it's just one of the transubstantiations Ben Mirov attempts in his latest collection of poems
Read MoreThe Impossible Magic of Becoming
/Even the speaker in Jennifer Denrow's new book knows that the California she imagines is one she'll never visit, one that cannot possibly be real - but that's what makes it so alluring.
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