Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
As the world's supply of writers outpaces the world's demand for their books, the financial returns for writing have fallen to laughable levels. Then why keep doing it? Paul Griffin explores the problem of writing and money.
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 More"Your field is the mind, mine is the brain - will the twain ever meet?" Master novelist E. L. Doctorow's latest deals with the traumas of duality.
Read MoreB. J. Novak, the gamine and unassuming star of the American version of The Office, has written a collection of short stories, and that collection, remarkably, got published. Justin Hickey decides to judge it on its merits.
Read MoreA dazzling, kaleidescopic debut novel journeys through Kenya's fraught post-colonial history while unpacking the tangled question of what it means to be a Kenyan.
Read MoreA close reading of Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return reminds us that the dream of every returning exile is to savor not only a lost land but a lost time.
Read MoreThe books we reread say a lot about who we are or who we hope to be. They also shape us, as Rebecca Mead discovers in exploring her own long relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Read MoreFebruary would be unremittingly bleak if it weren't for the excuse it gives us to ponder the meaning of love, that many-splendored thing. Our editors offer up their favorite literary treatments.
Read MoreOne could argue, from the evidence of cable TV ratings, that we've entered the age of the anti-hero. But why are they so popular? Adam Sternbergh's debut novel provides some unexpected answers.
Read MoreTo literary scholar Laura Frost, the great 20th century modernists created readerly pleasures not through familiar comforts but by transforming difficulty and strangeness into something exciting and new. Daniel Green tests the theory.
Read MoreRomance, nostalgia and beguiling delusions are hallmarks of Lara Vapnyar's novels, including her sinuous newest, The Scent of Pine
Read MoreThe new Bridget Jones novel will make you laugh and cry — but it might also make you fret, as it continues the series’ ongoing celebration of incompetence. Is blue soup really the best we can hope for, or the most we should strive for?
Read MoreCharles Blackstone, author of the novel Vintage Attraction and managing editor at Bookslut, speaks with Kevin Frazier about Chicago literature, online publishing, and being the spouse of a sommelier
Read MoreA murder, a trip to the dump, and oh yah - September 11. That wacky Thomas Pynchon is at it again!
Read MoreChimananda Ngozi Adichie's expansive novel Americanah centers on a Nigerian woman's immigration to the United States and eventual return to Nigeria. Orem Ochiel explores what her story says about complex, often traumatic experience of being black and African in the West.
Read MoreVintage records, black dogs, and lost souls fill Dead Set, a teen novel for readers (of all ages) who are sick of half-hearted Hunger Games clones.
Read MoreA light mantle of frost settles over the crowded events of Jumpha Lahiri's new novel, which is "about" loss in the way that Anna Karenina is "about" love
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Read MoreHow do you follow up on creating Tarzan of the Apes? You give the Ape-Man a son, stranding him in the jungle, and sending him out on hair-raising adventures of his own. And if you're lucky, a legendary comic book artist will come along and draw it all.
Read MoreElizabeth Gilbert’s ambitious novel imagines the life of a 19th-century woman botanist, as insightful as Darwin but lost to history. It’s an interesting project, and a worthy one, but does the novel live up to its premise?
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