Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
The whole while that Stevereads has been rolling out its annual assessments of the best – and worst – books of every passing year – that annual Gotterdamerung so secretly feared and yet so eagerly anticipated by publishers, authors, publicists, and readers alike – there’s been a gap, an omission that’s been bothering me just […]
Read MoreThe earliest fans of Star Trek encountered for the first time in 1966 something they’d before then only inferred: the past of their beloved starship Enterprise. They’d always known the Enterprise must have a past. They knew that Captain James T. Kirk had been the youngest person ever to command a starship, but there’d never […]
Read MoreA family from New Jersey moves to the wilds of Minnesota and learns a whole new way to think about food
Read MoreA sumptuous new book traces the long and complicated path St. Augustine took to reach his famous "Confessions"
Read MoreOur books today are the literary essays of that great 19th-century American belletrist James Russell Lowell, here in a lovely uniform green edition of four volumes put out in 1890 by Houghton, Mifflin in conjunction with The Riverside Press of Lowell’s home of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I found these volumes, predictably enough, at my beloved Brattle […]
Read MoreFor a solid fourth week of visits to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston, I’ve had first issues in my bag when I left. As I’ve mentioned here at Stevereads before, I remember when the appearance of a first issue was a big deal, fairly rare – finding one on the spinner rack of Trow’s […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics remain every bit as impenetrable no matter how often you come back to them – especially if they were more or less designed to be impenetrable. I know of no better example of this than the ancient Chinese classic called the I Ching or Book of Change; I’ve now grappled three times […]
Read MoreThe open, even evangelical atheism of the 21st century might be new, but as a sparkling-good new book demonstrates, atheism itself is as old as belief
Read MoreThis late in the year, for good or ill, the year’s publishing success stories are fairly well known – both “success” in terms of sales and “success” in terms of critical worth (and the rare, happy instances where the two coincide). So a negative review of one of these success stories jumps off the page, […]
Read MoreOur book today is a sturdy, inviting thing from 1910, the “Library Edition” that combines two books by William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions and Criticism and Fiction. The books were published years apart, and this lovely compendium was a thoughtful gift to me recently from the old lady who reviews the same novel every […]
Read MoreA big and colorful new biography of modern conservatism's larger-than-life ideological godfather
Read MoreA penetrating - and bitterly timely - book about the 2011 killing rampage of Anders Behring Breivik
Read MoreOnce again, I’m trying your patience by taking the long way around the barn to get to the actual feature I intend to call “The Art of the Mass Market”! That feature will celebrate just what it says on the tin: the art of mass market paperback reprints of books originally released in hardcover. And […]
Read MoreToday’s selection of new comics – reached at my beloved Comicopia through a miserable pining chilly mist – was typically broad and had plenty of interesting-looking new titles, including quite a few ever-optimistic first issues. In one of those, The All-New, All-Different Avengers (as with so much in the new, trendy, app-y Marvel Comics line, […]
Read MoreOur book today is a great gaudy thing from a great gaudy decade, The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo from 1978, with an Introduction by the late great science fiction editor Lester Del Rey, a third-rate hack of an author but an absolute impresario when it came to finding, editing, and packaging sci-fi and fantasy […]
Read MoreA huge - and hugely enjoyable - new book details the long history of the English people
Read MoreFor centuries, "pea-soup" fog was synonymous with the city of London; a lively new book tells its story.
Read MoreAh, yes: windows open, ceiling fan going, bare feet propped up on the nearest basset hound – all the typical hallmarks of November in New England! And how better to pass a hot, languid November weekend than with a nice fat biography, to take your mind off the sultry weather? Certainly I myself don’t know […]
Read MoreA stirring account of one wild family of critically-endangered Siberian tigers
Read MoreThe in-depth story of how it came to be that the Bronx is up and the Battery's down - the grid system of Manhattan!
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.