Book Review: The Last Unicorn
/Peter Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn turns 50. Alice Murphy reviews.
Read MoreBook Review: Inside Beethoven's Quartets
/Lewis Lockwood's Beethoven lectures result in this book about the master's string quartets. Elizabeth Hardy reviews.
Read MoreJuly 2008 Issue
/"Run Down House, Ooty" by Sriram Ramgopal
Read MoreThe Truth and John McCain
/In covering John McCain’s life and accomplishments, the American press has been, how shall we put it? less than tenacious. There are real stories they’ve yet to explore, or so argues Greg Waldmann in his first piece as Open Letters‘ Politics Editor.
Read MorePeer Review: Is Martin Amis Serious?
/The vituperation that greeted Martin Amis’ collection of essays The Second Plane reached singularly quotable proportions, even for this much-vituperated British author. In our regular feature, John G. Rodwan Jr. casts a cold eye on Amis’ dour detractors.
Read MoreWeathering
/Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies returns to the scene of the crimes of his debut Safelight, the soul-scarring world of Harlem paramedics. Lianne Habinek rides along through these dark alleys and shows us how Burke achieves dramatic power without dipping into sentimentality.
Read MoreThe Goldfish Variations
/a poem by Peter Jay Shippy
Read MoreExtravagant Things
/There is so much Tudor fiction in our world today that no one but the Tudors themselves could justify the extent of it. Even Steve Donoghue can’t read it all, but he has read more of it than is healthy, and he reports back in this installment of his “Year With the Tudors.”
Read MoreBehind the Scenes of Tudor Fiction: an Excerpt and Dissection
/An excerpt and dissection of Steve Donoghue’s Tudor novel Boy King
Read MoreIn the Hands of a Master
/If you don’t tell a good story then you’ve got no business writing history. According to Jan van Doop – who knows his fakes, phonies, and forgeries – Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell is the genuine article.
Read MoreCheap Thrills from 9/11
/Likewise the characterization of birdsong here is a little irritating, since we don’t really know all that’s going on in avian communication either.
Read MoreNew World Symphony
/Tuc Macfarland was forever changed when he first heard whalesong, something he shares in common with the men and women exploring those haunting sounds in David Rothenberg’s Thousand Mile Song.
Read MoreStrange Bedfellows
/In America America, a suburban everyman like those in Ethan Canin’s stories and novels finds himself in the center of a scandal that leads to a presidential hopeful’s ruin. Karen Vanuska explores how well Canin navigates his character through the bumptious subject of highstakes political intrigue.
Read MorePeer Review: Rushdie on the Richter Scale
/Since Salman Rushdie’s published The Enchantress of Florence, plenty of critics have trotted out what Martin Amis calls “the bullshit factfile” to to make their wordcount. Sam Sacks, for one, has heard more than enough about the fatwa, thanks…
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.
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