Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
John Blow has forever lived in the shadow of Henry Purcell, his former student. His musical response to the Purcell's death was partly competitive – others were also producing Purcell laments – but also discernably personal.
Read More"We can pour anything into it - any fear or catastrophe or yearning, any warning" - music both fills our lives and helps to shape them. But what happens if music starts, slowly, haltingly, to go away? A harrowing personal essay.
Read MoreFrank Kermode consumed all of the tumultuous 20th century's literary theories without being consumed by them. A look at the work of this wisest of secular clerics.
Read More"You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni" is a terrible line, a symptom of all the reasons George Eliot's Romola is a failure. But is failure really such a bad thing? Maybe a novelist's reach should exceed her grasp.
Read MoreAnthony Burgess the novelist had dreams of being a composer. He had little success, but along the way he delved deep into the nature and meaning of music.
Read MoreIt wouldn’t be summer without a giant killer shark novel, so Steve Donoghue goes for a fun swim with the, er, mother of them all, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium.
Read MoreA Clockwork Orange turned 50 this year and received the gift of an anniversary edition. Justin Hickey looks anew at the novel Anthony Burgess claimed to have knocked off in three weeks, and which made him famous.
Read MoreRandall Jarrell was suspicious of attempts to turn criticism into a science: he wrote as a reader, for other readers, with the work itself foremost in his mind.
Read MoreA sprawling new biography looks at both the quotidian day to day life and the pivotal music of the "cute" Beatle, Paul McCartney.
Read MoreOn Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and the crime of dismissive criticism in both Bookforum and The LA Review of Books.
Read MoreIn Stephen Akey's personal essay, the sex and squalor of William Goldman's The Temple of Gold appeals to the thirteen-year-old he was when he first encountered it - and prompts an adult reassessment.
Read MoreWhat would it mean if history were a joke, a shaggy dog story? J. G. Farrell’s bleakly funny Troubles reflects the struggle of post-war British literature to come to terms with the inheritance of modernism.
Read MoreWilliam S. Burroughs's notorious Cut-up Trilogy was his fiercest broadside against what he felt was the tyranny of linear thought. Steve Danziger delves into their Word Hoard.
Read MoreOpen Letters presents the first of many installments of Adam Golaski’s innovative new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a serialization.
Read MoreThe hero of David Levithan's "Every Day" - now out in paperback - lives his life as a spirit inhabiting the lives of others, until something happens that makes him want his own reality.
Read MoreElena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels — which form a sprawling epic about art, friendship, and power — are what Goethe called Weltliteratur: books that speak to the world, not just to a nation.
Read MoreTwo Idiots: Dostoevsky's classic and the new novel by Elif Batuman. What, if anything, do they have in common, and what do their differences say about each author's attitude toward fiction?
Read MoreAn outstanding new biography argues convincingly that Olivia Manning is one of the most undervalued woman novelists of the 20th century. But was Manning a “woman novelist”? She thought not.
Read MoreNew in the I Tatti series: a tract in praise of Christianity (at the expense of Jews and ancient pagans) by a towering figure of the early Renaissance.
Read MoreThe ancient partnership between humans and canines is the subject of a thorough new volume of research
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