Book Review: The Last Unicorn
/Peter Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn turns 50. Alice Murphy reviews.
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The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Peter Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn turns 50. Alice Murphy reviews.
Read MoreLewis Lockwood's Beethoven lectures result in this book about the master's string quartets. Elizabeth Hardy reviews.
Read More"Run Down House, Ooty" by Sriram Ramgopal
Read MoreIn 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 MoreThe 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 MoreShannon 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 Morea poem by Peter Jay Shippy
Read MoreThere 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 MoreAn excerpt and dissection of Steve Donoghue’s Tudor novel Boy King
Read MoreIf 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 MoreLikewise 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 MoreTuc 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 MoreIn 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 MoreSince 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 MoreThough 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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