http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog The Open Letters Monthly Blog Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:39:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Open Letters congratulates all the winners of this year’s National Book Award, most especially one of our favorite living authors, Peter Matthiessen, who won for Fiction with his massive epic Shadow Country. Back in May, Fiction Editor Sam Sacks reviewed Shadow Country and found it every bit as disturbing and ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/shadow-country/ ... please join Open Letters on Monday, November 24th at 7pm at the Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the wonderful books we've had a chance to explore this year and the poets and essayists we've had the privilege of publishing. Join us to hear: Nicolás Wey Gómez read from Tropics of Empire, ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/dear-friends/ One of the best parts of book-reviewing is also one of the most frustrating: the judgment of your peers. You read a book, you make copious notes on it, you walk your dogs and ponder it, and then you write your review. If you’re honest (and not compromised by house ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/critics-at-loggerheads/ How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care) By Ross W. Duffin W.W. Norton & Co., 2006 The physics of sound presents the musician with a problem – not everything can be in tune at once. Equal temperament is the common solution. It is not the only solution. Ross Duffin’s slim, accessible ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/new-in-paperback-how-equal-temperament-ruined-harmony/ The Children of Hurin By J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien Illustrated by Alan Lee Houghton Mifflin, 2007 The enormous popularity of this book – which is essentially a splenetic expansion of one chapter from the author’s faux-epic Silmarillion, courtesy of Tolkien’s son and very extremely industrious literary executor Christopher – was an enormous ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/new-in-paperback-the-children-of-hurin/ Painter Michela Emeson (cover artist for this month’s Open Letters), lives half in America and half in the "perfectly clear light" of Mexico. We asked four questions of the mysterious artist we're pleased to share her generous replies: OL: You've lived in both Mexico and Europe. Do you think this has ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/4-questions-for-cover-artist-michela-emeson/ The New York Review of Books in its current issue celebrates its own 45th birthday (can it really be that long?), and the method it chooses is only sensible: look to Open Letters! What else can explain (well,aside from deadline lag-times, but this way is more dramatic) all the OLM ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/more-on-the-nyrb/ Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook By Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero Marlowe & Company, 2007 Don’t skip this review because you’re not vegan. This cookbook is so awesome that even those self-proclaimed “carnivores” (sorry there T. rex, but you’re an omnivore) will find themselves enjoying their vegetables. This is the third cookbook ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-veganomicon/ It is no mean skill to write a gripping thriller. Comedy is easy, as Michael Frayn famously snarled, suspense is hard. Michael Crichton was the sparest of stylists: poor with character but terrific on plot. Plenty of readers shot thorough his books in one sitting and the best of ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/crichton-westworld-lange/ The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman who Ruled It By Tilar J. Mazzeo Harper Collins, 2008 It’s become a symbolic moment recognized identically all over the world: the pop of the champagne cork and the giddy rush of effervescence that is virtually synonymous with laughter. But in ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-the-widow-clicquot/ The Virginia Quarterly Review has announced the winner and runners-up of its young reviewer contest. The winner is Emily Wilkinson, who's also a blogger for the fine site The Millions. And that's all very well, but what really catches the eye is that former Open Letters contributor Giles Harvey is ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/honorably-mentioned-in-the-vqr/     Barack Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States. Open Letters offers warm congratulations.   Though we make no political endorsements, it would be blindness to survey the debris of the last eight years and not forthrightly conclude the Presidency of George W. Bush has been a disaster ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/44/   The New York Times Book Review has an “essay” on the reading habits of American Presidents of the past and the future but most conspicuously, not the present. It’s an edifying but altogether tepid article; not a single judgment confidently uttered, not one chance taken. Ignore the byline and the ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/presidential-reading-in-the-nytbr/ On the eve of another presidential election, and amidst the swarming panic attacks it invites, it seems a wise idea to take a few hours of solace in the newest issue of The New York Review of Books. This is The Review's 45th anniversary issue, and its very perdurability inspires ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/45-years-of-the-new-york-review-of-books/ Whether or not variety is the spice of life (monotony is often cruelly underestimated), it’s certainly the rule of the day in the November 2008 issue of Open Letters! Our current crop of articles wanders all over the ideological landscape, carrying only the rucksack of readability and the water bottle ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/open-letters-in-november/ The Dart League King By Keith Lee Morris Tin House Books, 2008 In his choppy but spirited sophomore novel The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris tries gamesomely to make a mountain from a molehill. The premise of the book is flauntingly trivial: in a tiny town in Idaho a league dart match ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-the-dart-league-king/ Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey By William Least-Heat Moon Little, Brown, 2008 There is a special magic to be found in the writing of William Least-Heat Moon – or not to be found, since its peculiar wavelengths don’t guarantee universal visibility. He is, of course, the author of Blue Highways, the seminal ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-roads-to-quoz/ Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners By Laura Claridge Random House, 2008 “Before you can hope to become even a passable guest,” Emily Post wrote in her eruptively readable 1922 classic Etiquette, “let alone a perfect one, you must learn as it were not to notice if hot soup ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-emily-post/ As surely as the days shorten, hardcovers turn to paperbacks, and lo! become almost affordable. Open Letters has featured many of these titles, not least Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream, her manifesto on the reflexively old-fashioned gender roles that locked into place in the aftermath of September 11. Joanna Scutts ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/new-in-paperback-3/ Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse By Timothy D. Lytton Harvard University Press, 2008 The sexual abuse scandal that engulfed the Catholic Church throughout the early 1990s was the worst catastrophe that venerable body had had to endure since Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. That former upheaval cost ... http://openlettersmonthly.com/blog/microreview-holding-bishops-accountable/