Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review

It Might Have Been

In life there are no second chances, no do-overs. But what if we could keep trying until we got it right? Kate Atkinson explores the possibilities in a novel that just might win her a coveted literary prize or two.

Snobs of Extraordinary Ability

By Max Ross

In Andre Aciman’s latest novel, a man recalls his time as a graduate student at Harvard, revisiting the early days of a long-estranged friendship.

The Madwoman and the Critic

By Elisa Gabbert

On Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and the crime of dismissive criticism in both Bookforum and The LA Review of Books

Balkan Zoology

By Pedja Jurisic

Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife was universally acclaimed by critics, but behind its beautiful writing lie some dangerously unexamined stereotypes about the Balkans. Pedja Jurisic digs beneath the mythology.

Second Glance: Another City

By John Cotter

Mark Wallace’s novels won’t be found at a Barnes & Noble, and that may be a shame beyond words: both Dead Carnival and The Quarry and the Lot reveal haunting truths and wrestle language into terrifying attitudes.

Loud, Loud, Loud: AUDUBON!!!!

By Steve Donoghue

He travelled the fledgling United States shooting birds, wiring them into poses, and then painting them for eternity – he was John James Audubon, and his epic “The Birds of America” has a beautiful, gargantuan new edition from Abbeville Press

Razing Hell

By Steve Danziger

In a new memoir packed with garbled madness, we get a funhouse-mirror autobiography of the legendary Richard Hell, who did more than anybody to invent punk rock and only haphazardly survived to tell the tale

No Kaddish For Old Men

By Maria Rybakova

Does love create an unbridgeable distance between two souls? Marco Roth’s searching memoir of his microbiologist father alternates between longing and numbness in its search for what, if anything, binds fathers and sons

Infinite Reflection

By Colleen Shea

Born of ancient Buddhist philosophy into the fragments of the modern world, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge asks essential questions about what it means to be human.

Rending the Familiar

By Anthony Stewart

Shane Book’s evocative collection Ceiling of Sticks shows us our familiar world in ways that might surprise even the most jaded reader into optimism about poetry.

Failing Gracelessly

By Greg Waldmann

The authors have invaluable sources in America’s ‘deep state’ of surveillance and counter-terrorism, but how much secrecy does security justify? And what happened to moral accountability?

from Soft Perimeter

By Michael Ives

a poem

“A Crystal Stranger Taking Off Their Mask”

By Jonathan Aprea

Constructing a “walrus itself” is a difficult thing to do – but it’s just one of the transubstantiations Ben Mirov attempts in his latest collection of poems

Sleazy Inner Tubes

By Steve Danziger

Artist Laura Carton does not surf pornography for the usual reasons, By digitally removing the ‘actors’ from their backgrounds, she creates strangely suggestive landscapes. In this interview she addresses both her process and her plan.

The Annotated Mix-Tape, #24

By Joshua Harmon

In this latest installment of his Mix Tape series, our writer discovers a new world of digital lore for young music fans and contrasts it with his analogue lessons of yore

American Aristocracy: Gods of Copley Square – Magic 1

By Douglass Shand-Tucci

A startling triptych illuminates the crossroads of social, racial, and sexual identity in the Copley Square of a century ago, as “The Gods of Copley Square” continues

It’s a Mystery: “Half of the future is buried in the past”

By Irma Heldman

Two seductive thrillers: one starring a fearless female cop, the other a boatload of washed-up MI5 spies.

Ad Infinitum

By Phillip A. Lobo

A radio voice crackles “Hallelujah,” and Booker DeWitt’s violent, surreal steampunk adventures in Columbia begin again in the latest BioShock chapter, BioShock Infinite

From the Archives: Fools in Love

By Sam Sacks

Like an overheated love letter, André Aciman’s novel Eight White Nights is easy to mock–but is it perhaps just as candid and emotionally powerful?

From the Archives: The Tiger Whelp

By Kevin Frazier

Tea Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife” is one of the most heralded fiction debuts of the season. Kevin Frazier weighs the switch-ups of its tone against the beauties of its prose.