Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Throughout its history, humankind has been both terrified by and obsessed with monsters - hence the booming 'cryptid' industry, traversing the globe in search of legendary beasts like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. A new book looks at the science and psychology behind our modern bogeymen.
Read MoreThe style of Clarice Lispector's unconventional and uneasy fiction was driven by both social anxiety and physical pain. How did this transubstantiation take place?
Read MoreFearless reporter Renata Adler's novel "Speedboat" has been stirring debate and controversy since it was published in 1976; now, in a new reprint from the New York Review of Books, it retains its power to shock, subvert, and just maybe seduce.
Read MoreDistance is complicated: it measures intimacy, but in unpredictable ways. Rebecca Solnit’s evocative new book explores the meaning of distance and closeness.
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Read MoreToday George Orwell is a buzzword; what can his collected letters tell us about the man himself? G. Robert Ogilvy looks for the human being beneath the persona.
Read MoreA newly translated selection of occasional prose by Robert Walser demonstrates the Swiss eccentric's range of manic humor and Romantic melancholy
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 MoreIn Caleb Crain's debut novel, a young man puts his ordinary life on hold and goes to post-revolution Prague in search of all the usual things young people go searching for in Prague. But, as reviewer Yulia Greyman observes, "false selves are a part of love."
Read More“We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Roxana Robinson's riveting novel challenges us to imagine how we can do that as we work for peace.
Read MoreA young man on a tentative law school track encounters the fiction of Philip Roth, and suddenly, his lostness acquires a commanding sense of purpose. An essay by Barrett Hathcock.
Read MoreThe Lord of the Rings draws on many medieval stories and myths. Oddly absent, however, are overt references to the one myth that ruled them all. A recently published poem fills that gap – but it may bemuse Tolkein's usual readers.
Read More'Everyone knows who won the war,’ runs the refrain of Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast; her newly published 1930 novel about the Spanish Civil War shows what it meant to be a witness to it.
Read MoreThe stories of British writer H.H. Munro, known by his pen-name Saki, are devastating studies in torment and cruelty; they're also exceptionally funny. A new collection offers a bracing reminder of that duality.
Read MoreShirley Jackson is best known – infamous, even – for her chilling story “The Lottery.” But it’s her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where battle rages between evil within and without, that’s her masterpiece.
Read MoreIn the famous jingle 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,' Katherine Parr comes last - the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. But she was far more than that - scholar, regent, and passionate young woman - as a new Tudor historical novel attempts to portray
Read MoreOur feature continues, as more Open Letters folk share their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Read MoreRichard Ford likes complexity, and he filled his novel, The Sportswriter, with sonnet-like weights and counterweights of tangled and gorgeous intricacy. As Spencer Lenfield's reading demonstrates, single sentences can contain worlds.
Read MoreBaz Luhrmann's blockbuster is merely the newest Great Gatsby for film or television--four adaptations before it attempted to capture the dazzle and pathos of the classic. Matt Sadler us on a tour of West Egg across the decades.
Read MoreNice as it is to revisit old friends, readers of Jane Gardam’s latest may end up wondering if all the most interesting things happened somewhere else, at some other time.
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