Book Review: Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?
/A slim, engaging new book tries to take an objective look at the popular question of Shakespearean authorship - if such objectivity is even possible.
Read MoreBook Review: Reading for My Life
/A new anthology samples from a lifetime's publications of a beloved critic
Read MoreQueen Elizabeth the First
/Elizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreWife Number Five
/Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read MoreBeyond the Pillars of Hercules
/In addition to their gods and goddesses, the ancient Greeks worshiped youth and athletic prowess, and their foremost bard was Pindar.
Read MoreOn the Bunny Slopes of Helicon
/Steven Moore's big new book seeks to give an 'alternative history' to that most familiar of literary forms, the novel. But at what point does history become wishful thinking?
Read MoreHilary Mantel’s Tudor novel Wolf Hall recently won the Man-Booker Prize. Each part of that sentence was guaranteed to attract Steve Donoghue’s attention.
Read More#10
/In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
Read MoreThe Grace of Seduction
/Steve Donoghue’s “A Year with the Romans” continues with a look at the obscure Roman poet Persius – and the great new book about him.
Read MoreTen Questions for Sarah Ruden
/Sarah Ruden, the latest and greatest translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, offers a funny and fascinating glimpse inside the classicist’s world in this Open Letters interview.
Read MoreA Review of A Naked Singularity
/If a book of this unsettling oddness and power can be found, virtually at random, on the lists of one self-publish print-on-demand outfit, we might well lie awake wondering what else we're missing, out there in the sprawling infinitude of computers and ISBNs.
Read More#2 Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich
/Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich
Read MoreGathering Driftwood
/For sixty years, the great and shapeshifting American author Evan S. Connell has woven strands of short stories through the fabric of his ongoing larger works. These beguiling stories have changed (and often deepened) with time while many of their ardors and tensions have remained the same, creating an irresistible dialectic. The three founding editors of Open Letters, united in their appreciation for this living legend of the American literary scene, pay tribute by writing a piece apiece on Connell’s life, career, and latest short story collection, Lost in Uttar Pradesh.
Read MoreMany Voyages Home
/As Tennyson told us a century ago, Odysseus has become a name for wandering and a template for every storyteller since. In Zachery Mason’s evocative first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, old myths find new words for the modern era; Steve Donoghue describes that newer world.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Gentle Poet
/At a poetry reading on the Palatine 2,000 years ago, you’d have spent a week’s pay to hear him read. Today he’s unknown, except to our Steve Donoghue (and a few of our readers, no doubt). Here, after a long time gone, is the Roman poet Tibullus.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Between the River and the Mountains
/In our regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits Giovanni Guareschi’s Little World of Don Camillo, an eternally comforting fictional oasis set in the heart of the Cold War.
Read MoreThe Latest from Yasnaya Polyana
/With so many versions of War and Peace to choose from, is there anything that translators can do to set themselves apart? Yes, says Steve Donoghue, they can make old mistakes.
Read MoreProper Read Stuff
/Fed up with the abuses of book reviewers, Gail Pool in her book Faint Praise advises editors to supply freelancers with a list of writing guidelines they would have to sign and abide by. Steve Donoghue isn’t quite ready to put his name on the dotted line.
Read MoreJust So Stories
/Should the brain-cracking complexity of modern science be explained in pithy one-liners? Steve Donoghue says no, even as he yields to the charm of Ira Flatow’s Present at the Future.
Read MoreH.H. Kirst and the Problem of Evil
/What do we do with great novels by a writer who was also a Nazi? Steve Donoghue investigates the terrible conundrum of H.H. Kirst.
Read More