Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
“The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karenina,’” wrote Virginia Woolf; “A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says ‘that is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.’" Joe Wright's cinematic adaptation of Tolstoy's classic novel avoids the pitfalls of such literalism.
Read MoreSay “Evgeny Onegin” to any educated Russian and you will trigger the first stanza or two of Pushkin's great novel in verse. Now Russia's national poet is finally coming into his own in the West as well.
Read MoreFor two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers - and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.
Read MoreThe best of Anthony Lane's many New Yorker reviews and essays were collected in Nobody's Perfect, a big volume that amply displays this writer's wit and subtlety.
Read MoreNicholson Baker's provocative new book is an attempt at mainstream literary pornography, but does it suffer from the same performance anxiety as other novelistic efforts to depict sex?
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