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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen
Over the past week I read three novels. Only one, Michele Roberts’s The Walworth Beauty, was for a review! The short version: it’s fine. Some things about it are very good, but overall I wasn’t that excited about it. I’m starting to feel I’ve read enough neo-Victorian novels. This has never been my favorite genre in […]
Read MoreIt comes back to the geese, in the end. I hoped it would, because of all the marvellous episodes in Wart’s education (the tyrannical pike, the totalitarian ants, the philosophical badger), his time with the geese is the most sublime. It’s beautifully written, for one thing, detailed and evocative, freely fanciful: The sun, as it […]
Read MoreI see it. I feel it, the sorrow of the dead who remain attached to a life they no longer have. I know it; I hear the sound of the blood draining away. The mind that deserts them, the brain clinging by the fingernails to the last shred of life as it runs out. Love, […]
Read MoreA monthly schedule really is relentless, isn’t it? And yet somehow, every month, we pull it off and present to the world another brand spanking new issue. As usual, I hope you’ll be tempted to go browse and read in it directly, but here are a couple of teasers: Once again we wrap up the […]
Read MoreHow’s that for a vague title for a blog post? But it is accurate, really: for the past couple of weeks my attention and energy have been focused on a range of different things. I haven’t felt inspired to write a sabbatical update for a while precisely because my activities seemed so miscellaneous, and not that […]
Read MoreLately I can’t seem to stop quoting Henry James’s remark that “nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it: the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.” However much we try as readers and critics to […]
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