July 2008
The Truth and John McCain
In covering John McCain’s life and accomplishments, the American press has been, how shall we put it? less than tenacious. There are real stories they’ve yet to explore, or so argues Greg Waldmann in his first piece as Open Letters‘ Politics Editor.
Peer Review:
Is Martin Amis Serious?
The vituperation that greeted Martin Amis’ collection of essays The Second Plane reached singularly quotable proportions, even for this much-vituperated British author. In our regular feature, John G. Rodwan Jr. casts a cold eye on Amis’ dour detractors.
Weathering
Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies returns to the scene of the crimes of his debut Safelight, the soul-scarring world of Harlem paramedics. Lianne Habinek rides along through these dark alleys and shows us how Burke achieves dramatic power without dipping into sentimentality.
The Goldfish Variations
a poem by Peter Jay Shippy
Extravagant Things
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.”
Behind the Scenes of Tudor Fiction
An excerpt and dissection of Steve Donoghue’s Tudor novel Boy King
In the Hands of a Master
If you don’t tell a good story then you’ve got no business writing history. According to Jan van Doop – who knows his fakes, phonies, and forgeries – Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell is the genuine article.
Cheap Thrills from 9/11
Andre Dubus III’s novel The Garden of Last Days is purportedly the newest addition to the canon of “September 11 novels”; Sharon Fulton, our committee of one, investigates the validity of that assertion
New World Symphony
Tuc Macfarland was forever changed when he first heard whalesong, something he shares in common with the men and women exploring those haunting sounds in David Rothenberg’s Thousand Mile Song.
Strange Bedfellows
In America America, a suburban everyman like those in Ethan Canin’s stories and novels finds himself in the center of a scandal that leads to a presidential hopeful’s ruin. Karen Vanuska explores how well Canin navigates his character through the bumptious subject of highstakes political intrigue.
Peer Review:
Rushdie on the Richter Scale
Since Salman Rushdie’s published The Enchantress of Florence, plenty of critics have trotted out what Martin Amis calls “the bullshit factfile” to to make their wordcount. Sam Sacks, for one, has heard more than enough about the fatwa, thanks…
Absent Friends:
The Harper in the Hall
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.
July’s cover photo, “Run Down House, Ooty,” comes to us from Sriram Ramgopal, a medical student and photographic enthusiast currently living in Chennai, India. A portfolio of his artwork over the past several years can be seen at http://www.insightfulart.com.
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