Good Grief: In Memory of Denis Johnson
/Denis Johnson died last month, but we have his ten novels and his legacy: the inclination to see the great beauty only afforded by the stripping away of joy.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: An Intellectual All The Time
/An old book by a monk may be the best thing ever written about the practice of thinking. Robert Minto revisits The Intellectual Life.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Lean Years of Plenty
/For a little over two years, shortly before she died, short story master Katherine Mansfield wrote a weekly book review column. Those pieces not only shed light on Mansfield's particular slant of genius, but have much to say about the embattled art of reviewing.
Read MoreFifty Years to an Early Grave: The Bittersweet Career of Wallace Markfield
/Wallace Markfield's debut has faded from the literary landscape. That's too bad, writes Matt Nesvisky, as this highly polished novel captures an important moment in American Jewish life.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: “Warm, funny, sad, true … It is Perfect”
/"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreSophistication and Recklessness: Patrick Leigh Fermor
/With Patrick Leigh Fermor's death, the world lost a gracious host, a tireless traveller, and one of the best prose stylists of the 20th century. We pause to appreciate him.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: The Harper in the Hall
/Though the American Civil War produced more and better books and writers than any single event in our country’s history, Bruce Catton is the greatest of its 20th century tellers. In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue tours the breathtaking work of an unfairly set-aside annalist.
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: With a Little Help from Saint Martin
/Steve Donoghue exhumes the sprawling, illuminating writing of Gregory of Tours, the wrongly forgotten 12th-century saint, historian, and natural-born raconteur
Read MoreAbsent Friends: In Primordial Seas, They Glide
/In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue dives deep into the work of James Russell Lowell, whose splendid writing lurks in the basins of bookstore bargain carts, too often passed over for the smaller fry.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Oh True Apothecary!
/In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the books of the 17th-Century physician Nicholas Culpeper, whose medicine may be archaic but whose wisdom and literary merit are by no means obsolete.
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 MoreAbsent Friends: Himself
/The only trouble with Sean O’Casey’s brilliant plays is that they overshadowhis magnificent memoirs. In our monthly feature, Steve Donoghuetries to even the scales.
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