The Original Wasn't Better
/Amardeep Singh rebuts the oldest of film-goer complaints with a defense of adaptations of classic literature, the more inventive the better
Read MoreWhen the Whole Story Isn't Enough
/When Peter Stein adapted Dostoevsky’s The Demons for the stage, he found himself unable to cut a single scene of its 800 pages. The result: a marathon 12-hour production.
Read MoreAxes Piling Up
/Open Letters talks with Adam Golaski about the earlier translations of Sir Gawain, the original MS, and his own "Green"
Read MoreLate to the Movies
/Movies notoriously fail when they try to depict interiority. So why not just restrict ourselves to books? For a million reasons and more.
Read MoreOn the Scent: The Smell of Money
/What are you paying for when you buy an expensive perfume--better materials? A longer-lasting scent? Placebo effect? Our regular perfume columnist sniffs it out.
Read MoreUneasy Witness
/Vegetarians choose to be vegetarians and meat-eaters choose to be "normal." Melanie Joy cuts into the language we use to describe our food and the mindset behind it.
Read MoreSounds Simple, Nearly Impossible
/The documentary Restrepo, set in the deepest and most violent American outpost in Afganastan, ushers us "through a door most Americans don't know about and don't want to know about"
Read MoreIlluminations
/Alberto Manguel’s library of 30,000 books is his Holy of Holies, and his new essay collection is a spiritual (and at times gnomic) journey through its most sacred texts
Read MoreThe Thin, Clear, Happy Call
/The sunlit aesthetics of the Edwardian era have been given a new look in this essay collection, and the consensus leans decidedly toward the darker meanings belying those lovely surfaces
Read MoreAn Anvil Unto Sorrow
/What we know about Edward II came from the brilliant mind of Christopher Marlowe. A new biography seeks to separate the real man from the dramatist’s fertile imagination.
Read MoreDame Alice
/Alice Perrers is reviled by history for insinuating her way into Edward III’s bed and Queen Phillipa’s jewels. Now Emma Campion’s new novel aims to rescue her tattered reputation.
Read MoreCity of Sorrow
/In 2009, Ciudad Juarez reported 2,700 homicides. As Charles Bowden’s new book Murder City shows, the bloody drug-war just south of the border shows no signs of abating
Read MoreMidlife Magic
/Emmanuel Carrere’s memoir is an uneasy blend of sexual fantasy and archival records, of a future with a beautiful young woman and a past haunted by a possible Nazi collaborator
Read MoreThe Ass Made Proud
/As Mark Twain pointed out a century ago, there's no evidence the man from Stratford ever read a book, much less owned one, and so the number of books alleging and 'proving' evidence of his grand fraud grows and grows ...
Read MoreAugust 2010 Issue
/draft notes from Adam Golaski's "Green"
Read MoreGreen : first fitt
/The entire first fitt from Adam Golaski's groundbreaking new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Read MoreIt’s A Mystery: “Truth is the daughter of time”
/The 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 MoreA Year with Short Novels: Diving into Atwood’s Surfacing
/This installment of the Year with Short Novels immerses itself in Margaret Atwood’s haunting second novel, Surfacing.
Read MoreThe Sound and the Furry
/As our freelancer Khalid Ponte validly points out, the problem with werewolves is literature, not lycanthropy: they lack a foundational text! Although an excellent recent anthology offers some likely candidates.
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