Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Josiah for President by Martha Bolton Zondervan, 2012 “If you can’t trust the Amish, who can you trust?” asks a gushing voter in Martha Bolton’s debut novel, Josiah for President, and like jesting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. Bolton may be a first-time novelist, but she’s an old hand at writing, with over [...]
Read MoreIn Michael Dahlie's new novel, an idle young millionaire ghost-writes a book for an arrogant Hollywood star
Read MoreMy usual one-two combination of The London Review of Books and the TLS always has a huge amount of long, meaty, scholarly piece of literary journalism – that’s why I’ve been coming back to them every week since before most of you were born. And this last week was no exception, with plenty of great, [...]
Read MoreShe's a master thief who wants to rob the world's richest man; he's a master assassin who wants to kill the world's richest man - what happens when they run headlong into each other in a glass-and-steel death-trap?
Read MoreA new history of World War I looks at twelve fragile moments, twelve turning points when small factors determined very large outcomes
Read MoreEarth's frozen, forbidding continent is the subject of Gabrielle Walker's latest book
Read MoreThe death of a talented teenage artist spins his family and friends into turmoil in Manu Joseph's incredibly accomplished second novel.
Read MoreIn the latest Ismail Kadare novel to be translated into English, an Albanian doctor invites the invading Nazis to an elaborate dinner at his house - but what exactly happens that night, to the strains of Schubert?
Read MoreUntil comparatively recently, historically speaking, mankind existed in small hunter-gatherer societies without states or agriculture. Best-selling author Jared Diamond's latest book examines the possible up-side of those primitive edens.
Read MoreAs usual, the latest National Geographic contained wonders – and as usual, many of those wonders were distinctly familiar to me! That’s one of the best things about the magazine, for those of its readers who’ve seen a bit of the world: the best photographers in the business work every month to bring it all [...]
Read MoreSince there’s bloody little else to do on these wretched state and federal holidays during which the holy Post Office is closed (and with a winter storm coming – that being something of a tradition for Inauguration Days I care about), we can get a lot of extra reading done on Martin Luther King Day. [...]
Read MoreDC Comics collects the 1980s adventures of the Man of Steel, as drawn by the legendary Gil Kane!
Read MoreA generous anthology collects the work of one of the greatest travel-writers of our day
Read MoreMarvel's X-Men reprint series reaches some epoch-defining issues
Read MoreIn Lara Santoro's new novella, an older woman falls head-over-heels into a physical passion for a younger man - with consequences that threaten to tear her life apart
Read MoreHero of Rome by Douglas Jackson Corgi Books, 2011 (US paperback) “She did not look like a man in woman’s dress,” we’re told. “She was tall, certainly, and well-built, but the turn of her wrists was graceful and the waving curls of red hair escaping from her four braids stirred against a face that [...]
Read MoreThe rhetoric of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar might inflame you, it might make you mad - but does Garry Wills o'ershoot himself in his analysis of it all?
Read MoreThe “New 52″ company-wide conceptual reboot that DC Comics pulled off recently has been such a success (both financially and, I grudgingly admit, increasingly creatively as well)(some of the new titles launched back in 2011 are really starting to find their footing, much though I’ll always miss the old standbys they replaced) that transformed the [...]
Read MoreA new - and forgiving? - look at the ancient Jewish historian whose very name has been hated for two thousand years.
Read MoreThe legendary fantasy series at long last comes to its conclusion
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.