Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
To literary scholar Laura Frost, the great 20th century modernists created readerly pleasures not through familiar comforts but by transforming difficulty and strangeness into something exciting and new. Daniel Green tests the theory.
Read MoreUnsettled and penniless, James Joyce's exile was initially more imrpovised than cunning. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story of his early years on the continent.
Read MoreSome of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read More"Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers…their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has balls.” This and other gleanings from a trip to the David Foster Wallace archives.
Read MoreIs Don DeLillo's short game as good as his long? Is it better? His first collection of short fiction -- or is it his first? -- offers occasion to take the much-lauded writer's measure.
Read MoreIt's a comfortable truism that the novels of Jane Austen are all things to all readers. But ... a life-instruction manual? From the OLM Archives, a review of A Jane Austen Education
Read MoreFrench trailblazer Raymond Roussel created teeming and fertile worlds from a secret process of wordplay. Two of his most spectacular works are coming back into print after a long, undeserved absence.
Read MoreYou think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble... Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham's paradoxical novel "By Nightfall".
Read MoreEver since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes -- and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
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