Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
The Penny Press this week featured a long article on a remorseless natural disaster, something that strikes without warning, wantonly destroys property, and inflicts untold pain and misery on humans around the world. I refer, of course, to corgis. Specifically, to a wonderfully wonky article in the latest Vanity Fair by Michael Joseph Gross about […]
Read MoreFar from the popular image of ravenous killing machines, wolves are actually surprisingly cautious predators who carefully weigh the risks they take, as a stunning new study illustrates
Read MoreA distant planet crackling with "dark energy" holds mind-boggling secrets for the crew of humans sent to explore it
Read MoreYears ago, two young girls were abducted and held for two months by a mysterious stranger; in the present, in Maggie Mitchell's terrific debut novel, these women are now confronted with the suspicion that a part of their childhood ordeal is very much alive.
Read MoreMilitary historian Stephen Harding tells the poignant story of the last soldier killed in World War II
Read MoreThe always-delightful “Summer Reading” issue of The Weekly Standard came out recently (with its typically witty cover, only this one, unlike all the earlier classics of its kind, worries that its central joke will be missed by the general readership – so the punch line, “The Turn of the Screw,” is actually spelled out, just […]
Read MoreIn the future, a vast corporation sends operatives back in time to loot the past, and those operatives have one rule above all others: bring nobody back with you. When one of those operatives breaks that rule, Wesley Chu's novel takes off
Read MoreWhen enigmatic aliens plunge down in the ocean off the coast of Nigeria, three very different humans encounter them - and watch as the world is changed forever
Read MoreTime and again in the history of life, environmental pressures and biological systems combine to produce the same adaptations in wildly different species and epochs. It's called convergent evolution, and Simon Conway Morris has written its grand opera.
Read MoreA decorated Roman soldier accompanies a dangerous mission into barbarian territory in 4th century Britain
Read MoreThe forgotten Midwestern town of Normandy Falls becomes the setting for an increasingly horrifying - and surreal - series of events in Kevin Keating's outstanding new novel
Read MoreOur book today is an amplified edition of Obiter Dicta, which English politician Augustine Birrell first published in 1885 but had occasion to re-issue a couple of times between 1885 and 1890. The book is a collection of some of the literary pieces Birrell was always working on while also serving in various governments at […]
Read MoreIn "Hostile Takeover," Shane Kuhn provides a raucous follow-up to his popular novel "The Intern's Handbook"
Read MoreTwo brothers - one simple-minded, the other quite possibly devious - are at the heart of Stuart Prebble's new thriller
Read MoreI’m one of many periodical readers, I suspect, who read Usman Malik’s superb mini-essay “Rockets, Robots, and Reckless Imagination” in The Herald magazine out of Pakistan; the piece has been linked and shared liberally since it appeared a couple of days ago, and deservedly so. In a little over 2000 words, Malik manages to write […]
Read MoreJust in time for America's Independence Day, the Library of America presents its newest production: a two-volume collection of some of the pamphlets that so inflamed the colonial population in the decade leading up to the Revolution
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have perfect timing. Not many, as you’d expect, since the line deals primarily in works of literature that are specifically timeless – but in some cases, the when can mean a lot even alongside the what, and today is one of those case: a pretty new Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s […]
Read MoreThree sisters and their various husbands and children gather at the family's inviting old Cape Cod vacation home, where they face drama, revelation, heartache, and maybe personal re-invention.
Read MoreA wealthy family in dazzling 1920s Newport, Rhode Island faces problems and revelations in both the material world of their huge estate - and also in the spirit world, where secrets will be revealed
Read MoreIn the early 1720s, the regent of France risked both his young king and his young daughter on high-stakes international gambles in the ongoing War of Succession; a sparkling new novel dramatizes the events
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.