Articles in belles-lettres
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.
The Madwoman and the Critic
On Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and the crime of dismissive criticism in both Bookforum and The LA Review of Books
In the Shadow of a Hero: Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Traumatized by her baby’s kidnapping and murder, disappointed in her marriage to a fallen hero, Anne Morrow Lindbergh found hope in the beautiful, fragile shells she found on the beach. The result was her gentle masterpiece Gifts from the Sea.
I Groan In Silence
The media just won’t leave old man Voltaire alone! We run a transcript of the latest interview.
Troppo Sottile
Venice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison’s science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.
Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plums
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is beloved for its wit and wisdom. But behind its many beauties lurks a disquieting conclusion: that misery is the price we must pay for morality.
From the Archives: Seer Blest
Frank Kermode consumed all of the tumultuous 20th century’s literary theories without being consumed by them. A look at the work of this wisest of secular clerics.
Queen of the Gypsies
Spoiler alert! It’s a familiar warning — but isn’t it also a silly one? There’s so much more to novels than their plots. And yet what if we’re better readers for not knowing? Consider The Mill on the Floss, for example.
A Little Cryptic, A Little Proud, A Little Mad
In M. John Harrison’s lyrical Viriconium trilogy, the high science of quantum physics meets the low art of fighting giant locusts. Justin Hickey finds a quiet spot to watch the chitin fly.
Absent Friends: “Warm, funny, sad, true … It is Perfect”
“The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it” wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes – most of the time – despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Back, Back, Down the Old Ways of Time: D. H. Lawrence in Italy
Year after year, D. H.Lawrence found love, lust, and gainful employment in Italy – and through the strange alchemy of the place, he also found the inspirations for some of his most enduring works of art.
Fiona’s Gambit
John le Carré is still as popular as he’s ever been, but what about Len Deighton? Our correspondent has gone back to Deighton’s novels and found their Cold War intrigue and human dramas as rewarding as ever.
From the Archives: Everything United In Her
It’s a comfortable truism that the novels of Jane Austen are all things to all readers. But … a life-instruction manual? From the OLM Archives, a review of A Jane Austen Education
Tom and Em
It is said that Thomas Hardy fell deeply in love with his wife, Emma, only after she died. Stephen Akey revisits the stunning, elegiac poetry he wrote in her memory.
Tea with the Pushkins in Brussels
Say “Evgeny Onegin” to any educated Russian and you will trigger the first stanza or two of Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Now Russia’s national poet is finally coming into his own in the West as well.
Thinking God Knows What: James Joyce and Trieste
Unsettled and penniless, James Joyce’s exile was initially more imrpovised than cunning. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story of his early years on the continent.
Ou-Boum
“I knew my trip would mean an encounter with Adela Quested”: Victoria Olsen reflects on what she found, and what was lost in translation, when she travelled to India with E. M. Forster on her mind.
Borges and You
Although I would rather do almost anything than attend a literary reading (like, for instance, stay home and read), I made an exception for Jorge Luis Borges when he lectured to a packed house at …
This Light is Enough
Renowned reviewer and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn has a scintillating new collection of his recent work; John Cotter and Steve Donoghue compare notes on “Waiting for the Barbarians”
First Person Singular
Can a famously cold and impersonal writer like Paul Auster make a memoir of aging that works against his strengths? And are they strengths after all?
Nine Ways of Looking at D’Annunzio
Madman, lothario, despot, drug fiend, friend and enemy of Mussolini – and immortal poet. Gabriele D’Annunzio was all of these things and many more in his whirlwind of a life.
Attainted: The Life and Afterlife of Ezra Pound in Italy
Pound wrote The Pisan Cantos on toilet paper while prisoner in an open-air metal cage during WWII, and he spent many of the following years in mental hospitals. “I can get along with crazy people,” he quipped. “It’s only the fools I can’t stand.”
Therapeutic Wordsworth
There are warring schools of fad and interpretation, there are critical readings of an hour or a season – and then there’s Wordsworth’s verse itself, annotating and amplifying the personal reading experience.
From the Archives: A Voyeur in the Archives
“Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers…their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has balls.” This and other gleanings from a trip to the David Foster Wallace archives.
Good in the Good Sense: Antonio Machado
The great Antonio Machado loved his native Spain and was disgusted by its descent into fascism; that fusion of enchantment and grief vivifies his unforgettable poetry.
‘Glory, Maiden, Glory!’: The Uncomfortable Chivalry of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
You think you know Ivanhoe: it’s the original swash-buckling adventure story, full of fights, escapes, ambushes, and then, of course, a happy ending. But what you see if you look more closely may make you think twice about its chivalric ideals.
From the Archives: Cato of the Antipodes
Open Letters mourns the loss of Gore Vidal, sine qua non, ne plus ultra
Summer Reading 2012
As the haze and heat of summer kick into full swing, the folk of Open Letters break out their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Summer Reading 2012 Continues
Our feature continues, as more Open Letters folk share their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Humane to Hornets: The Poetry of James Schuyler
The verses of the neglected poet James Schuyler seem to ramble, but they don’t really ramble; they seem dishevelled, but they aren’t; they seem miniaturist, but they contain whole worlds. Stephen Akey makes the case for your renewed attention.
A Measure of the Master: Georges Simenon’s romans durs
The inventor of the beloved Inspector Maigret was gigantically prolific – hundreds of novels, churned out at lightning speed (80 pages a day, according to the author himself) – and in this as in many other things, Georges Simenon was a world unto himself.
Peer Review: Home
Book reviewers are split on whether Toni Morrison’s new novel is a further triumph or a falling off. Or have these critics only found what they anticipated? We review the reviews, then we review the book.
Macaroni and Cheese
“You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni” is a terrible line, a symptom of all the reasons George Eliot’s Romola is a failure. But is failure really such a bad thing? Maybe a novelist’s reach should exceed her grasp.
All the World to Nothing
The real mystery of Richard III is not the fate of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, but why we never tire of telling and re-telling his story. What do we really see when we stare at his enigmatic portrait?
Facts, And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Art, Truth, Data, Sex, and Facebook–rabble-roused by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact, Max Ross connects them in a key to all nonfiction aesthetics
Bad for You
Known as much for how she exited her life as for the poetry she wrote during it, Sylvia Plath remains a polarizing figure in the world of verse. What are we reading, when we subject ourselves to her poems?
Downright Rude: Reading Catullus
The raw sexuality of the Catullus’ love poems keeps them alive even today, and the things he implied about Julius Caesar STILL can’t be repeated in polite conversation – how do we deal with this young man who’s always making us feel just a bit uncomfortable?
American Aristocracy – Harvard Pulpit: Boston Brahmin Liberalism
To the quintessential virtues the Puritans lent to a fledgling republic – globality, philantropy, and autonomy – the ‘speaking aristocracy’ of the Boston Brahmins added one more: the love of learning
Shore to Shore
For two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers – and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.
Queen Elizabeth the First
Elizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it – which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
The Tigers of Wrath
Where would Lionel Trilling, godfather of the liberal imagination, fit into our contemporary culture of ideas? And how much of that culture is of his making?
Aid in the Labyrinth
Randall Jarrell was suspicious of attempts to turn criticism into a science: he wrote as a reader, for other readers, with the work itself foremost in his mind.
The Knower and the Sayer
Most criticism is reactive, but in his essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proved prophetic. He set a challenge and Walt Whitman took him up on it.
Acts of Rendition
Richard Poirier was one of the great bridge-builders–his sorely neglected classic A World Elsewhere drew upon the writing of Emerson but presciently anticipated the postmodernist ideas that would soon enter the mainstream.
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lane
The best of Anthony Lane’s many New Yorker reviews and essays were collected in Nobody’s Perfect, a big volume that amply displays this writer’s wit and subtlety.
Wallace Stevens: A Spirit Storming
Wallace Stevens, so long considered the driest and most cerebral of poets, can in fact touch the soul. It all hangs on the nature of poetry itself, what it is.
Recognizably Human: Larkin and the Sentimental
Nobody would accuse the mature Larkin of being a greeting card poet, and yet a warm and even vulnerable sentimentality bubbles up in his verse, often when it’s least expected.
“The Desire for Motion”: Tagore’s Three Voices
Prince of the Bengali renaissance, internationally feted poet, composer, painter, educator — why don’t we know Rabindranath Tagore today? And will a new book open our eyes?
Between the Devil and Aunt Edna
His own life was the great tragedy he was never quite able to write. Michael Adams assesses the career of playwright Terence Rattigan.
Over Grinton Bridge: Riding into the Heart of Reformation
A rich, beautiful, but sadly neglected historical masterpiece: Hilda Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey is the War and Peace of the English Reformation
In Lieu of a Drink
Provocative public intellectual/muckraker Christopher Hitchens offers an enormous volume of collected essays and articles, probably his last.
‘What a Brain must Mine be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth
Once considered a credible rival to Dickens and Thackeray, W. H. Ainsworth is nearly forgotten today. It’s our loss: his historical novels – full of sensuous detail – run the gamut of romance and horror, tragedy and comedy.
Oh, the futility! Adapting Jane Eyre
Its early readers found the novel shocking, unfeminine, un-Christian, revolutionary. So why are film adaptations of Jane Eyre so studiously inoffensive?
Memo to a Colleague
Is Marjorie Garber’s defense of literary studies balm to the beleaguered English professor’s soul? Not yet, anyway.
“He had become my Tarzan”
Tarzan is one of the most popular fictional creations in modern times. Does the Ape Man define something essential in the human experience – or do we keep redefining Tarzan to suit our ever-changing needs?
The Muse of Trouville
‘She’s a drug; I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.’ Victoria Best explores the fraught relationship between Marguerite Duras and the young man whose love inspired and tormented her.
One Common Reader
Virginia Woolf imagined the Almighty seeing us coming towards Paradise, books in hand: “We have nothing to give them, they have loved reading.” But does reading always bring salvation?
Of Form, E-Readers, and Thwarted Genius: End of a Year with Short Novels
In our Internet-fueled new century, can the in-between genre of the short novel survive? Or have novellas – with their speed and feral intensity – finally come into their own? Our Year with Short Novels concludes.
Literature is Dead, Long Live Literature
Is the death of literature finally dead? If not, it’s been dealt a healthy blow by Gregory Jusdanis’ Fiction Agonistes, even it art does have to “justify itself in a way not necessary before.”
The Prodigal Brothers
Ever since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes — and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
Temporarily Miracle-Sodden
The most Bellovian figure of all may have been the man who lent us the term. A new collection of Saul Bellow’s letters present the man in all his exuberant passion and thorny short-temper.
Misfiring the Canon
Of the charismatic Yale lecturer one adoring student wrote, “Charles Hill is God,” and in his new book, Hill moves in mysterious ways. He claims that statecraft and the Western canon are inextricably linked — but there are doubters in the temple.
The Platypus
For more than fifty years and more than fifty novels, Louis Auchincloss chronicled the lives of New York’s upper class. His last book is a memoir of his life among that upper class — but is truth stranger than fiction?
The Purposes of Creation
As reproductive technology has become more advanced, the value of those engineered lives has become more complicated. Two recent novels provide a striking perspective on this growing conflict.
George Eliot for Dummies
Free thinker, strong-minded woman, scholar, lover, novelist: George Eliot lived a courageous life that should be known and celebrated. But does Brenda Maddox’s new biography do it justice?
Encountering Kundera
“Art is dying,” Milan Kundera writes in his essay collection “Encounter,” “because the need for art is dying”; John G. Rodwan, Jr. assesses his attempt to re-stoke that need
The Original Wasn’t Better
Amardeep Singh rebuts the oldest of film-goer complaints with a defense of adaptations of classic literature, the more inventive the better
Illuminations
Alberto Manguel’s library of 30,000 books is his Holy of Holies, and his new essay collection is a spiritual (and at times gnomic) journey through its most sacred texts
Midlife Magic
Emmanuel Carrere’s memoir is an uneasy blend of sexual fantasy and archival records, of a future with a beautiful young woman and a past haunted by a possible Nazi collaborator
On the Bunny Slopes of Helicon
Steven Moore’s big new book seeks to give an ‘alternative history’ to that most familiar of literary forms, the novel. But at what point does history become wishful thinking?
Write, Repeat Redux
In his new memoir, Christopher Hitchens regales his readers with one good story after another. But as John Rodwan shows, we’ve heard most of them before – lots of times.
The Nautilus
When John Ruskin, the foremost architectural critic of the Victorian era, discovered Venice, he fell in love. An elaborate new work paints the picture in great detail.
Adeste Fideles
Woe to the critic who calls Edith Grossman’s translations “seamless.” In her combative new treatise she argues for a greater recognition of the artistry of translation–but how many liberties can a translator take while staying true to the original?
Uncertainty Principles
In Changing My Mind novelist Zadie Smith, long a literary essayist, gathers together her burgeoning belles-lettres. Is it just a chance collection or does a common theme run through them? Sam Sacks reviews her views.
On Finding That My Novel Can Be Bought on Amazon.com for $0.01
Here today, gone tomorrow – remaindered on Amazon.com the day after that! Martha Moffett turns in a cautionary tale of the tangled fate of one novel.
Going Off Course with Melville and Liebling
Two seemingly dissimilar figures in the American literary landscape – Herman Melville and A. J. Liebling – shared at least one thing aside from a way with words: they weren’t afraid of a little digression now and then. John G. Rodwan Jr. follows along for the stories.
The Same Indifference
In The Same Man, David Lebedoff maintains that Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were Doppelgängers, both in their art and their ethics; John G. Rodwan Jr. begs to differ.
All the Sad Old Men
In Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life, a committed feminist writes a collection of essays about literary men; Laura Tanenbaum monitors these latest dispatches from the gender conflict.
Write, Repeat
Notorious critic and essayist Christopher Hitchens has commented that certain writers are not shy of repeating themselves, and his critics have fired it right back at him. John G. Rodwan, Jr. enters the echo chamber.
The Homeless Moon
The Homeless Moon
by Andrews, Deluca, Hoffman, Howe, & Ridler
Creative Commons Chapbook, 2008
The Homeless Moon is a chapbook collection of five short stories, all of which could be called science fiction but might also be called …
Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition
Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition
by Jack Kerouac
Viking, 2008
Louis Menand wrote an excellent piece in the New Yorker last year about On the Road, reminding us of the huge loneliness and nostalgia in and around the …
Destruction Manual
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
Second Glance: A Compilation Too Far?
In his lifetime, E.B. White oversaw nearly a dozen collections of his essays; Karen Vanuska appraises a posthumous ingathering edited by Rebecca M. Dale and lets us know whether it adds to White’s legacy or merely overlaps it
Catalog Reading
Sam Sacks reviews Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure, an old-fashioned reading guide that wants desperately to believe it hasn’t been made altogether anachronistic by the Internet, that elephant in the corner of the library.
Second Glance: Marilynne Robinson’s Psalms and Prophecy
This month our regular feature is devoted to a study of the small but potent canon of Marilynne Robinson. Sam Sacks dives back into her famous fiction and formidable essays.
Whispers Through the Curtain
For fifteen years a British and a Soviet family built a friendship by slipping letters past KGB censors. Karen Vanuska celebrates From Newbury with Love, a collection of their rich correspondence.
Proper Read Stuff
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.
Absent Friends: I Could Wake Up in Nirvana and Laugh
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.
To Wider, Stranger Worlds
Virginia Woolf buried the late John Evelyn with a single review. Now Leah Lambrusco lets us know whether Gillian Darley’s resurrected the diarist in John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity. (Yes, he’s the other restoration diarist).
Absent Friends: Himself
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.
Mount Wharton
Steve Donoghue converses with the critics in his review of Hermione Lee’s page-turning but harrowingly huge biography of Edith Wharton
Shall We in That Great Night Rejoice?
Steve Donoghue assesses all of twentieth century literature. That’s correct: all of twentieth century literature. Don’t believe it…?
Childe Harold’s Children
Sam Sacks looks into the breakout debuts of young novelists to determine how youth, ambition, and general cluelessness affect the writing of these early works.
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