August 2008

 

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.   Familiar Wishes, by Sam Sacks “The disturbing power of Connell’s best character studies derives from the fact that they are not voyeuristic but associative. We see aspects of ourselves in them, no matter how materially different our lives may be. But you have to get the particulars down to get to the essentials….”

Gathering Driftwood, by Steve Donoghue
“The characters who take chances, who light out for the territories, are always the ones rewarded, if often obscurely. It’s a quintessentially American theme, and he’s explored it well and memorably in his long career….”

Backyard Arcana, by John Cotter
“Connell’s characters are ensorcelled by mysteries which remain out of reach. Such a seeker is J.D. from ‘The Walls of Ávila,’ who spends his youth traveling the world in search of an exoticism that will … will what? scrub him free of the American Midwest? put an end to his desire…?”

Being Che
a poem by Matthew Klane

Scolds in the Agora
For those too addled by Xbox to grasp subtlety, Mark Bauerlein and Richard Shenkman have titled their respective books The Dumbest Generation and Just How Stupid Are We? For the rest of us, Laura Tanenbaum provides a nuanced evaluation of the laments of these cultural Jeremiahs.

Life on the Page He’s the world’s most highly-regarded critic, and in How Fiction Works James Wood doesn’t stop at simply describing what’s in good novels but prescribes how they ought to be written. Daniel Green tells us how the fiction that James Wood really, really likes works.

Pinnacle Lianne Habinek reviews Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs and gives up all the gossip on one of the most strange and successful relationships in music history, the ménage à trois among Glenn Gould, a blind piano tuner, and a one-of-a-kind Steinway concert grand.

He Went Thataway
Overlooked by many historians is the fact that Columbus didn’t just sail west to reach the East, he also sailed south, and he (and the rest of the world) had some specific ideas of what that meant. Bartolomeo Piccolomini shows how Nicolas Wey Gomez’s new book brings the full sphere of The Discoverer’s navigation to life, showing you a Columbus you never knew.

One Encounter: Eight Hours from Home
Out of cash, out of work, bounced from his home, and lost in the world, Steve Brachmann turned to an old friend for help—W. Somerset Maugham. In this installment of our regular feature, we see how a single good book—for Steve, it was Of Human Bondage—can help right a life.

Worthy of a Tale or Two 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.

The End of the End of the End of the End of History
In his latest book (a slim one this time), Robert Kagan again probes the socio-political state of the West. History is back, he tells us—about a week after he told us it was gone. Greg Waldmann helps us to to keep track of the epochs without a scorecard in his review of The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

“That is Impossible,” He Told the Court At the peak of his career, Naval Secretary (and posthumously famous diarist) Samuel Pepys found himself out of a job, in jail, and facing execution for his alleged plot against the government. Father and son writing team of James and Ben Long take the reader through all the twists and turns of the case; father and son reviewers Thurlow and Zach Truman report back.

August’s cover photo, “Hi There!” comes to us from Sven Werkmeister in Berlin, Germany. More of Sven’s photograph can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenwerk/

The image of Evan S. Connell displayed on this page and in “Gathering Driftwood” is by Tom Hartley.

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