Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read MoreWhen the long reign of Victoria ended, her son took the throne with a bonhomie the country hadn't seen in a century. The new king ate and entertained prodigiously - and mediated prodigiously as "the uncle of Europe." A Year with the Windsors looks at Edward VII.
Read MoreIrma Heldman reviews Taylor Stevens' "The Informationist" and concludes that not since "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has there been a debut novel like it
Read MoreHis short novels are the 'ugly stepchildren' of 20th century fiction, and yet his admirers are legion; A Year with Short Novels takes a look at Nathanael West and his two best-known works.
Read MoreIn our Internet-fueled new century, can the in-between genre of the short novel survive? Or have novellas - with their speed and feral intensity - finally come into their own? Our Year with Short Novels concludes.
Read MoreCharles Portis's "True Grit" features a young girl who's all business and a grizzled gunslinger who's all heart -- but there's far more complexity and humor to the story than the Hollywood pairing implies. Ingrid Norton looks at a great American novella.
Read MoreJ. R. Ackerley's complex and marvelous novella "We Think the World of You"--in which two lonely, repressed people contend for the affections of a glorious dog--is the next work featured in "A Year with Short Novels."
Read MoreDennis Tafoya’s second crime novel, "The Wolves of Fairmount Park," confirms that he is a brilliant new voice with a finely tuned modern noir sensibility.
Read MoreThe twisty boundaries of narrative reliability are at the heart of Ingrid Norton's discussion the neglected classic "The Pilgrim Hawk" as "A Year with Short Novels" continues.
Read MoreThe first two novels of Nicola Upson's highly promising, thoroughly engaging series stars the great mystery writer Josephine Tey as a sleuth she herself might have invented
Read MoreThis installment of the Year with Short Novels immerses itself in Margaret Atwood’s haunting second novel, Surfacing.
Read MoreReaders have adored Truman Capote's iconic Holly Golightly; they might be amazed, then, by how much Capote borrowed from Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles
Read MoreThe final book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, leaves no doubt that Lisbeth Salander, his punk hacker protagonist, has no equal in the annals of crime fiction
Read MoreIngrid Norton's Year with Short Novels continues in this installment about William Maxwell's problematically nostalgic novella So Long, See You Tomorrow
Read MoreIt was only a matter of time before our Year with Short Novels got around to the most famous one of them all and traveled deep into The Heart of Darkness.
Read MoreIn her latest novel, False Mermaid, Erin Hart once again connects an ancient Celtic crime to a thoroughly modern mystery.
Read MoreThe Lifted Veil, George Eliot's dalliance with Gothic horror, turns out to be nearly as dense and cerebral as her masterpieces; though of course, in keeping with the theme of this monthly feature, it's far far shorter.
Read MoreThe jewel-like perfection of Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" is the subject of Ingrid Norton's scrutiny in this latest installment of "The Year of Short Novels"
Read MoreThere is not a false note in Paganini’s Ghost, Paul Adam’s superbly calibrated mystery that unfolds around the intrigue generated by a priceless instrument and its keepers.
Read MoreThey don't work as books, but they do work their way on us - insistently, insidiously. We throw them across the room, but we keep picking them up again.
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