Our Year in Reading 2013
In this annual retrospective, the Open Letters team looks back on the highlights of our 2013 reading.
Our Year in Reading 2013 Continues
More of our annual retrospective, in which the Open Letters team looks back on the highlights of our 2013 reading.
Desperately Seeking Solzhenitsyn
Every correspondent in Moscow wanted to be the first to find Solzhenitsyn after he won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Michael Johson had that honor – but the great Russian writer wasn’t altogether pleased so see him.
Bridget of Sighs
The 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?
Studio Matto e Disperatissimo: The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi
He was the greatest Italian poet since Dante, but he was tormented by a strict upbringing, ruinous health, and moods of black pessmism. He was Giacomo Leopardi, and this is his story.
Second Glance: Wretched Creatures
John Ford’s story of star-crossed lovers is bloodier than Shakespeare’s and more heart-wrenching, too, for it’s a tragedy of childhood, of innocence lost.
Thousands of Grids
Building on his previous work, in New Poems Ben Mazer tries to find a balance between structure and fluidity.
Second Glance: Kapuściński’s Africa
Ryszard Kapuściński has courted controversy for the poetic licenses in his groundbreaking works of history. But it’s those leaps of imagination and sympathy that make his 2001 book on Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, a lasting work of art.
It Was Fun, the Struggle
The age of Roosevelt and Taft was also the age of Progressive reform – spearheaded by an amazing team of ‘muckraking’ writers the like of which the United States had never seen.
ctrl+issues
“Do you see?” the Narrator says. “Don’t you know you were dead the minute you hit Start?” Phillip Lobo deciphers The Stanley Parable
It’s a Mystery: “There’s no score worth dying for”
Shoot the Woman First is the third in Wallace Stroby’s Crissa Stone series, featuring one of crime fiction’s newest and best bad girls
Wine and Bellow: An Interview with Charles Blackstone
Charles 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
From the Archives: …then we are “jingoes”
A new book argues that Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst stampeded the United States into the Spanish-American War to feed imperial ambition and sell some newspapers. Are the roots of modern America rotten?
From the Archives: Our Year in Reading 2012
In this special feature, we look back at some highlights of the reading we did in 2012.
From the Archives: Our Year in Reading 2012 Continues
In this special feature, we look back at some highlights of the reading we did in 2012.
OL Weekly »
Book Review: Barry Powell’s Iliad
A life-long love of the Classics is distilled into a new translation of Homer’s Iliad
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Best Books of 2013: History!
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“He was my shadow, or I was his”: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat
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Best Books of 2013: Collected Letters!
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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: You Say You Want a Revolution?
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Book Review: Barry Powell’s Iliad
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Taxonomy and Grace
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Second Glance: Astonish Us
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In Defense of the Memory Theater
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Against the Wind
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Attainted: The Life and Afterlife of Ezra Pound in Italy
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Colleen: Thank you for your kind words! I've always struggl...
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ek: why be afraid to state the obvious? It is painful...
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Ivan Kenneally: Hi Barnie, I think there's a split but argue th...
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Barnie: I dont think there is any split between Chagall´s ...
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IA: An excellent article on a classic play that deserv...
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