The most famous fictional creation this side of Tarzan has undergone innumerable changes over the years, and author Tom DeHaven tries to chart them all in his new book on the Man of Steel.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was peaceful, orderly, and above all sensible, or so says towering Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Two new books look at the man and the Revolution he so indelibly described.

Can Fantagraphics’ Spectrum series of contemporary fantasy art yield the same sort of enjoyment as a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Steve Donoghue looks into the newest collection.

When he was banished for life from Rome, Ovid was trying to alter his artistic forms with his Metamorphoses. Trace the transformations in Steve Donoghue’s final “Year with the Romans”

Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novel Wolf Hall recently won the Man-Booker Prize. Each part of that sentence was guaranteed to attract Steve Donoghue’s attention.

He was everybody’s friend, and his poetry breathes with life even today. He was Horace, and “A Year with the Romans” makes his acquaintance.

In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.

Steve Donoghue’s “A Year with the Romans” continues with a look at the obscure Roman poet Persius – and the great new book about him.

He ruled the world of Sunday comics with a singing sword and a grin. He was Prince Valiant, and Fantagraphics lets him fight again. Steve Donoghue goes blow-by-blow.

Statesmen, philosophers, and serial killers turn to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but what was the emperor himself like? Frank McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius tells, and in this month’s “A Year with the Romans,” Steve Donoghue assesses.

The only surviving full-length biography of Alexander the Great was written by a Roman. Steve Donoghue looks at Quintus Curtius Rufus as “A Year with the Romans” continues.

Church and State collided in Henry VIII’s England, and Durham Cathedral was caught in the middle. Steve Donoghue returns to his Tudor beat to review Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Last Divine Office.

Bryn Mawr’s deaconess Edith Hamilton and Catullus, the bard of Rome’s underbelly, would seem to have little in common. Steve Donoghue brokers a meeting in the latest “Year with the Romans.”

Steve Donoghue takes the emperor’s box to thumbs-up or thumbs-down an array of Roman historical novels, as “A Year with the Romans” continues.

It wouldn’t be summer without a giant killer shark novel, so Steve Donoghue goes for a fun swim with the, er, mother of them all, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium.

J.J. Abrams’ long-awaited Star Trek reboot has hit theaters, and Steve Donoghue looks into whether it carries on a proud legacy, or else overturns it.

Sarah Ruden, the latest and greatest translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, offers a funny and fascinating glimpse inside the classicist’s world in this Open Letters interview.

Steve Donoghue’s “Year with the Romans” turns its eye upon Titus Livius, who either wrote poetical history or historical poetry, depending on who you ask.

Just as we approach the time when there will be no more living witnesses to the Second World War, Richard Evans concludes his monumental three-volume Nazi history with The Third Reich at War. Steve Donoghue makes record of the results.

Virgil’s Aeneid has been attracting translators for centuries, and Sarah Ruden’s rendering is notable in more ways than one. (She calls him Vergil, for one thing, but that’s just the start.) Steve Donoghue regards her efforts in the latest “A Year with the Romans.”

He was a slave who wrote his way to freedom – unless he wasn’t, and unless he didn’t. Steve Donoghue’s “A Year with the Romans” looks at the great comic playwright Terence.

Ronald Reagan was the only modern U.S. President to keep a daily journal. Steve Donoghue plumbs The Unabridged Reagan Diaries in search of the diarist’s soul.

In the 6th Century, Boethius wrote a little tract that has been a guide and touchstone to writers, poets, politicians, and pundits ever since. David Slavitt has produced a new translation of The Consolation of Philosophy; Steve Donoghue explores the world of Boethius in this latest installment of “A Year with the Romans.”

They were wealthy, influential, and for two centuries in England they wielded power to rival the king’s … but who were the Earls of Pembroke (and their equally formidable wives)? In Quarrel with the King, Adam Nicolson takes us beyond the pomp, and here Steve Donoghue looks at the politics of family.

Among the Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb, Steve Donoghue unearths a rare secondhand treasure in Ovid’s difficult, underrated Fasti. And he celebrates.

Would the inventor of “sprung rhythm” have lived a more carefree existence in a world that allowed him to live and love the way he wanted? What poetry would he write in such a world? Steve Donoghue takes a brisk dip into Paul Mariani’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.

Before there was Norman Rockwell, there was J.C. Leyendecker, inventor of the advertising brand, star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post, and clandestine gay man. America loved what Leyendecker drew; Steve Donoghue shows us what they were really seeing.

The kings and counts of Tudor England wouldn’t have known the name of minor Cheshire landowner Humphrey Newton, but in reviewing Deborah Youngs’ book on the man, Steve Donoghue illustrates just how much Newton can teach us about the era. “A Year with the Tudors” concludes here.

Before the pestiferous little Corsican conquered Europe, he tried his hand at Egypt – Steve Donoghue exposes how the general disposes in his review of Paul Strathern’s Napoleon in Egypt.

In the penultimate installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue pauses to consider some of the young men and women who didn’t quite make it onto the roster of Tudor monarchs.

Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson achieved immortal fame in his Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862. Peter Cozzens re-examines the man behind the legend, and Steve Donoghue adjudges the results.

William Shakespeare lived under the Tudors for most of his life, but he only wrote about them once, in his play The History of the Life of King Henry VIII – or did he? In our latest One Encounter, and also the new installment in his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue takes a look at that play and the fractious theories attendant.

Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich

Mary Tudor’s fierce Catholic faith and merciless persecution of Protestants gave her the immortal nickname of “Bloody Mary.” In our ongoing feature A Year with the Tudors, Steve Donoghue reviews Linda Porter’s The First Queen of England: The Myth of “Bloody Mary.”

There’s something going on in the latest trend of Tudor book-covers, and we’re not sure what it is, although a pair (shall we say?) of aspects is quite obvious. What are these publishers thinking? Take a look for yourself! and a second look! and a third!

For sixty years, the great and shapeshifting American author Evan S. Connell has woven strands of short stories through the fabric of his ongoing larger works. These beguiling stories have changed (and often deepened) with time while many of their ardors and tensions have remained the same, creating an irresistible dialectic. The three founding editors of Open Letters, united in their appreciation for this living legend of the American literary scene, pay tribute by writing a piece apiece on Connell’s life, career, and latest short story collection, Lost in Uttar Pradesh.

Without him, there would be no “Year with the Tudors,” and in the latest chapter of his year-long feature, Steve Donoghue examines Henry Tudor, who took the crown from Richard III at Bosworth Field and became Henry VII – the first Tudor monarch.

There is so much Tudor fiction in our world today that no one but the Tudors themselves could justify the extent of it. Even Steve Donoghue can’t read it all, but he has read more of it than is healthy, and he reports back in this installment of his “Year With the Tudors.”

An excerpt and dissection of Steve Donoghue’s Tudor novel Boy King

Though the American Civil War produced more and better books and writers than any single event in our country’s history, Bruce Catton is the greatest of its 20th century tellers. In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue tours the breathtaking work of an unfairly set-aside annalist.

Ninety years ago, the author of The Birds of Puerto Rico bludgeoned a small boy to death with the help of then-lover Richard Loeb. Steve Donoghue takes readers through Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It—in which Clarence Darrow fights the good fight for a couple of very, very bad boys.

Alison Weir’s new novel The Lady Elizabeth evokes the snakepit of internecine maneuverings, dynastic labyrinths, and the lunges of religious zealotry that characterized the age named for the lady in question. Steve Donoghue’s “Year With the Tudors” continues here.

Ted Sorensen was the most loyal of JFK’s retainers and the last to finally spill the beans about the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve Donoghue walks us through the worthy—if somewhat hedging—memoir of an eloquent and haunted man.

As Tennyson told us a century ago, Odysseus has become a name for wandering and a template for every storyteller since. In Zachery Mason’s evocative first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, old myths find new words for the modern era; Steve Donoghue describes that newer world.

More than any other dynasty in history, the Tudors are ready for their close-up. In this installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue leads us on a royal progress through film archives to access the heart and stomach of these undying superstars.

At a poetry reading on the Palatine 2,000 years ago, you’d have spent a week’s pay to hear him read. Today he’s unknown, except to our Steve Donoghue (and a few of our readers, no doubt). Here, after a long time gone, is the Roman poet Tibullus.

Plotlessness, gimmickry, tin-eared dialogue, navel-gazing, heavy-handed symbolism: Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman lovingly abuse these and other writerly sins in How Not to Write a Novel, and Steve Donoghue joins in their Bronx cheer

Jane Boleyn took the witness stand and falsely testified that her brother committed incest with her sister-in-law, Anne Boleyn. In this installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue tries to fathom the motives of such slander.

Steve Donoghue exhumes the sprawling, illuminating writing of Gregory of Tours, the wrongly forgotten 12th-century saint, historian, and natural-born raconteur

The premise of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is that all of us are a lot more irrational a lot more often than we thought; Steve Donoghue tries to determine if the inmates really are running the asylum

Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey: commander, courtier, poet. In this installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue tells the story of how such an extraordinary young man fell foul of Henry VIII.

In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue dives deep into the work of James Russell Lowell, whose splendid writing lurks in the basins of bookstore bargain carts, too often passed over for the smaller fry.

Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought turns on the 1828 presidential race between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, a tawdry epic of mudslinging the likes of which would not be seen until our own era. Steve Donoghue revisits how it all, alas, began.

Steve Donoghue continues his “Year with the Tudors” with this look at Chris Skidmore’s biography of Edward VI, the ill-starred son of Henry VIII who might have been the most formidable Tudor monarch of all.

In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the books of the 17th-Century physician Nicholas Culpeper, whose medicine may be archaic but whose wisdom and literary merit are by no means obsolete.

As Steve Donoghue writes, the epitome of what a monarch can be was embodied in the massive form of Henry VIII, and not a year passes without another biographer struggling to tackle the man and his legacy. 2007 was no different….

In our regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits Giovanni Guareschi’s Little World of Don Camillo, an eternally comforting fictional oasis set in the heart of the Cold War.

There was no popular conception of the serial killer in Victorian England in 1888. Jack the Ripper was self-made man, and, as Steve Donoghue writes, no one knows who he was.

With so many versions of War and Peace to choose from, is there anything that new translators can do to set themselves apart? Yes, says Steve Donoghue, they can make old mistakes.

Fed up with the abuses of book reviewers, Gail Pool in her book Faint Praise advises editors to supply freelancers with a list of writing guidelines they would have to sign and abide by. Steve Donoghue isn’t quite ready to put his name on the dotted line.

George Custer knew damn well how many Indians he’d be fighting at Little Bighorn, but the myths of that battle have overcrowded the truth. To sort one from the other, Steve Donoghue charges into a shelf of Custerology.

A good man’s life is rare and pure enough to revisit for its own sake. Steve Donoghue looks back on why Theodore Roosevelt meant so much to so many, and how he earned his spot on that big rock.

In The Know-It-All, A.J. Jacobs reduced learning to the memorization of trivia; now in The Year of Living Biblically he reduces religious faith to growing a beard. Steve Donoghue, in turn, reduces A.J. Jacobs.

Steve Donoghue reviews pollster-guru Mark J. Penn’s Microtrends, a book that sheds light on the campaign mentality of our most powerful politicians. The weak of stomach must consider themselves duly warned.

In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the life and letters of John Jay Chapman, an eloquent American wit now forgotten, whose writings once provoked and delighted an enthusiastic public.

Almost a century ago, the squabbles of one privileged family decimated all of Europe. Steve Donoghue investigates Catrine Clay’s impossibly comprehensive retelling in King, Kaiser, Tsar:

Should the brain-cracking complexity of modern science be explained in pithy one-liners? Steve Donoghue says no, even as he yields to the charm of Ira Flatow’s Present at the Future.

Gun-and-net-toting naturalists seldom produce a better writer than William Beebe. In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits the science writing of a more invasive age.

Simon & Schuster is calling Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution a work of science. Steve Donoghue examines just how blasphemous a claim that is.

James Fenimore Cooper’s greatness as a novelist has been almost completely lost behind a single, hilarious skewering from Mark Twain. Steve Donoghue reviews a new biography that tries desperately to win back the poor man’s reputation.

Ah, that slave-trading John Hawkins, what a dreamy, dashing man! Steve Donoghue reviews Susan Ronald’s The Pirate Queen, an Elizabethan history a trifle more interested in romance than, um, what actually happened.

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us has an irresistible premise: what
would happen on Earth if human beings suddenly disappeared? Steve
Donoghue cheerfully follows Weisman’s lead.

Vincent Bugliosi has written a 1,621 page book about the Kennedy
assassination. Steve Donoghue guides us through it and the terrible
three minutes in Dealey Plaza that changed everything about our world.

The only trouble with Sean O’Casey’s brilliant plays is that they overshadow
his magnificent memoirs. In our monthly feature, Steve Donoghue
tries to even the scales.

What do we do with great novels by a writer who was also a Nazi? In our monthly feature, Steve Donoghue investigates the terrible conundrum of H.H. Kirst.

Alan Axelrod’s Blooding at Great Meadows perpetuates a few too many myths about George Washington. Fortunately, we have Steve Donoghue to set the hagiographers straight.

Steve Donoghue converses with the critics in his review of Hermione Lee’s page-turning but harrowingly huge biography of Edith Wharton

Steve Donoghue reviews John Donne: The Reformed Soul, a new “cuss-and-codpiece” biography by the inconceivably youthful John Stubbs

In this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue spots a troubling pattern of left-handed praise in the reviews of Robert Fagles new translation of the Aeneid

Steve Donoghue gently debunks the anthropocentric conceits of Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter’s newest book, I Am a Strange Loop.

In this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue revisits the great life and writing of Gerald of Wales, a continuously frustrated candidate for the Archbishopric of Wales.

Steve Donoghue assesses all of twentieth century literature. That’s correct: all of twentieth century literature. Don’t believe it…?

In this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue touts the overlooked sea novels of Nicholas Monsarrat.