Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
The great and problematic poet Robert Browning drew some of his most powerful poetic inspirations from the lore and lure of Italy; Luciano Mangiafico traces the complicated relationship of the man to his "adopted homeland."
Read MoreHow could they do it, those young men who, with every reason to live, walked deliberately into machine-gun fire? Joe Sacco gives us a panoramic view of the horror, the labor, and the losses of WWI.
Read MoreFor years, pioneering blogger Andrew Sullivan was one of the most vocal supporters of the war in Iraq. Time and the war's wretched progress gradually forced him to change his thinking, however, and a new collection of his writings on the subject charts the disillusioning step-by-step.
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Read MoreTo literary scholar Laura Frost, the great 20th century modernists created readerly pleasures not through familiar comforts but by transforming difficulty and strangeness into something exciting and new. Daniel Green tests the theory.
Read MoreThe Russian dissident writers are largely unknown in the West today, but their work was an inspiration at a time when their compatriots were forbidden to dream different dreams.
Read MoreShe was the daughter, the sister, and the wife of kings in one of England's most turbulent periods, but Alison Weir's new biography is the first to make us feel we really know Elizabeth of York.
Read MoreByron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know -- and eventually his amorous, adventurous spirit led him to Italy.
Read MoreHe was the greatest Italian poet since Dante, but he was tormented by a strict upbringing, ruinous health, and moods of black pessmism. He was Giacomo Leopardi, and this is his story.
Read MoreThe age of Roosevelt and Taft was also the age of Progressive reform - spearheaded by an amazing team of 'muckraking' writers the like of which the United States had never seen.
Read MoreChimananda Ngozi Adichie's expansive novel Americanah centers on a Nigerian woman's immigration to the United States and eventual return to Nigeria. Orem Ochiel explores what her story says about complex, often traumatic experience of being black and African in the West.
Read MoreCampaign books have short shelf-lives - and they deserve them, since most of them have about as much introspection as yesterday's racing form. Greg Waldmann reads a recent book on the pivotal 2012 U.S. presidential election.
Read MoreFrom the agora 2,400 years ago to the present day, the schools of Plato and Aristotle have been locked in combat; a new book sees the struggle in disarmingly simple terms.
Read MoreBefore he became one of America's most famous presidents, John Kennedy was a hot-shot senator and a photogenic winner of the Pulitzer Prize. But did the Senate years help to form the Oval Office years?
Read MoreA girl, a widow, a matriarch, a mother, a businesswoman, and a minister's slave: a new history traces the Salem Witch Trials through the lives of six women who paid dearly for their proximity to one of the most mysterious incidents in American history
Read MoreKing and Woolman's new book Assassination of the Archduke, boasts new sources, very close to Franz Ferdinand and his wife -- too close?
Read MorePresident, prime minister, or unnamed Tsar, Vladimir Putin is at once ubiquitous and unknowable; a new book examines the many facets of a new species of autocrat.
Read MoreThe meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreIn Caleb Crain's debut novel, a young man puts his ordinary life on hold and goes to post-revolution Prague in search of all the usual things young people go searching for in Prague. But, as reviewer Yulia Greyman observes, "false selves are a part of love."
Read MoreIt became entangled with the imperial hopes of a nation and inspired the design of one of the most significant buildings of the 19th century, the Crystal Palace: a new book explores the remarkable story of the Amazonian water lily.
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