Second Glance: Real News
/At a time when the world of news is in unprecedented furore, David Halberstam’s classic book on the media deserves renewed attention and appreciation.
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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Second Glance
At a time when the world of news is in unprecedented furore, David Halberstam’s classic book on the media deserves renewed attention and appreciation.
Read MoreThis month our regular feature is devoted to a study of the small but potent canon of Marilynne Robinson. Sam Sacks dives back into her famous fiction and formidable essays.
Read MoreThe working title of D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love was Dies Irae - Day of Wrath. But reading it will make you feel not despairing but vibrantly alive.
Read MoreNothing shakes up the literary establishment like women writers -- or women readers -- who won't stay quietly in their place.
Read MoreJohn Bunyan's book-length religious allegory Pilgrim's Progress strikes many of today's readers as hopelessly hokey and tone-deaf - but it still has abundant power to change lives, as one passionate reader attests.
Read MoreOver time, the books of our youth make way for titles better suited to the grown-up readers we have become. But not all of them: YA or not, some books -- such as K. M. Peyton's Pennington trilogy -- deserve a lasting place on our shelves.
Read MoreWe mourn the death of the great Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant and are re-running Karen Vanuska's moving appreciation from 2009 in tribute.
Read MoreJohn Ford's story of star-crossed lovers is bloodier than Shakespeare's and more heart-wrenching, too, for it's a tragedy of childhood, of innocence lost.
Read MoreRyszard Kapuściński has courted controversy for the poetic licenses in his groundbreaking works of history. But it's those leaps of imagination and sympathy that make his 2001 book on Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, a lasting work of art.
Read More“The Moonstone will have its vengeance on you and yours!” Those fateful words propel us into one of the first and best of modern English detective novels -- still sensational after all these years.
Read MoreThe Knight of the Burning Pestle began its theatrical run in1607—and concluded it almost immediately. But why? Colleen Shea explores the mysterious failure of this hilarious, satirical, meta-theatrical romp.
Read MoreMark Wallace's novels won't be found at a Barnes & Noble, and that may be a shame beyond words: both Dead Carnival and The Quarry and the Lot reveal haunting truths and wrestle language into terrifying attitudes.
Read MoreHe may not have anything new to tell us today, but as Spencer Lenfield demonstrates, Gilbert Highet's friendly, engaging pedagogy is still rare enough to keep him relevant.
Read MoreGeorge Eliot's Middlemarch is beloved for its wit and wisdom. But behind its many beauties lurks a disquieting possibility: that misery is the price we must pay for morality.
Read MoreSpoiler alert! It’s a familiar warning — but isn’t it also a silly one? There’s so much more to novels than their plots. And yet what if we're better readers for not knowing? Consider The Mill on the Floss, for example.
Read MoreLong before Hairpin and Jezebel, Jane Collier, under the influence of Jonathan Swift, was savagely satirizing women's ettiquette guides in her work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Chris R. Morgan revisits the caustic classic.
Read MoreAnthony Burgess is famous, but not for his best book. John Cotter sees your A Clockwork Orange and raises you the new Europa edition of Earthly Powers.
Read MoreYou think you know Ivanhoe: it's the original swash-buckling adventure story, full of fights, escapes, ambushes, and then, of course, a happy ending. But what you see if you look more closely may make you think twice about its chivalric ideals.
Read MoreMcGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, RFK, JFK, LBJ--these were the best and the brightest of David Halberstam's landmark study of American politics during the Vietnam War. The book is now 40 years old and its lessons are as vital as ever.
Read MoreFelix Holt, the Radical may be one of George Eliot’s least-read novels, but its questions about a democracy that puts power in the hands of "ignorant numbers" still have both moral and political resonance.
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