Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
"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 MoreBig slabs of glass may look impressive, but they have a serious effect on our interaction with art. Museums are changing, and it isn't always a good thing.
Read MoreThere are two kinds of essayists: explainers and explorers. Which populate the new series from Restless Books about the human face? John Cotter investigates.
Read MoreDavid Bowie
Read MoreEssayist, critic, novelist, and public gadfly: Gore Vidal's long career took many forms and sprang from a life as dramatic as his work. Has that life finally found a biography to do it justice?
Read MoreMichael Mewshaw comes not to praise Gore Vidal but to bury him in this new memoir of a friendship that did not outlast Mr. Vidal's funeral.
Read MoreHorror fiction may not at first compare with more respectable genres, but look a bit closer. Horror is one of the oldest emotions known to man, and the artists who've evoked it have been some of our most brilliant and most strange ...
Read MoreIn his latest collection of essays, Theater of Cruelty, Ian Buruma launches a series of expert investigations into the springs of cruelty and the perils of victomhood.
Read MoreRusty Barnes' debut novel Reckoning is both a hardbitten Appalachia noir and tender coming of age tale, both real art and real fun.
Read MoreIn Valeria Luiselli's debut novel, a young Mexican woman imagines the real life of a long-dead man whose writings she has forged in the voice of a famous American poet. Then things get complicated.
Read MoreIn his latest novel In Paradise Peter Matthiessen dramatizes a collision between the thoughtful philosophy of Zen and the worst of the 20th Century's horrors.
Read MoreJohn Cotter looks into new mixed-media books of poetry by Bill Knott and John Yau to discover shades of meaning in the interplay of artwork and verse.
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Read MoreIs David Rakoff's novel-in-verse either worthy verse or a worthy novel? Does he pull off a high-wire act, as so many critics have concluded, or is it all a grand illusion?
Read MoreMere words have the power to kill, literally, in Max Barry's new thriller. Who welds them? And how worthy are Barry's own words?
Read MoreIs close reading disappearing? And is that the most pressing problem facing universities? Terry Eagleton's latest, How to Read Literature is a plea for a return to what made the humanities worth knowing.
Read MoreRon Currie Jr. is not only the author of the new novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, he is also its protagonist.
Read MoreBurgess gave himself room to stretch his arms (and facts) in the two volumes of his Confessions. That space to digress, opine, sing songs, is what makes both books so memorable -- even indispensable.
Read MoreCan a famously cold and impersonal writer like Paul Auster make a memoir of aging that works against his strengths? And are they strengths after all?
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